


Soldier Defendant Judge

by madsmurf, ninemoons42



Series: SDJ [1]
Category: Ghost in the Shell, Prometheus (2012), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Movie Fusion, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Big Bang Challenge, Canon Disabled Character, Crapsack World, Cyborgs, Gen, Hacking, M/M, Mental Abuse, Mind Rape, Neglect, Past Abuse, Physical Disability, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Team as Family, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-17
Updated: 2013-01-17
Packaged: 2017-11-25 20:51:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 71,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/642837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madsmurf/pseuds/madsmurf, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles Xavier has spent most of his life confined and dreaming digital dreams to escape the pain of that confinement. Having lost all hope of escape or release, it's a powerful shock when he is suddenly handed his freedom - and then he learns that freedom comes with a price. Sometimes, however, that price is easy to pay, especially when it means coming into contact with powerful and faithful friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soldier Defendant Judge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [madsmurf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madsmurf/gifts), [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/gifts), [Pangea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pangea/gifts), [Tybalt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tybalt/gifts).



title: Soldier Defendant Judge  
Written for Round Two @ [X-Men Big Bang](http://xmenbigbang.livejournal.com/)   
author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)**ninemoons42**  
artist: [madsmurf](http://madsmurf.livejournal.com/)  
verse: This is an X-Men: First Class fusion with the world of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which also includes themes and elements from Prometheus, Wanted, and Inception.  
word count: approx. 72,100 words  
rating: R  
characters/pairings: Main pairing is Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr. Fic also includes (platonic) Charles Xavier/David 8. Cast includes the entirety of Public Safety Section 9 from Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex, and OCs based on the actors of the Avengers movie.  
warnings: Discussion of mental abuse; depictions and discussion of mind rape; depictions and discussion of both acute and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder; fight scenes, extensive physical injuries, and graphic violence. Angst related to abovementioned mental abuse. Themes of familial neglect. Cyberpunk crapsack world.  
Author's notes, credits, and acknowledgements appear at the end.  
summary: Charles Xavier has spent most of his life confined and dreaming digital dreams to escape the pain of that confinement. Having lost all hope of escape or release, it's a powerful shock when he is suddenly handed his freedom - and then he learns that freedom comes with a price. Sometimes, however, that price is easy to pay, especially when it means coming into contact with powerful and faithful friends.

[Ghost in the Shell: Primer](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/215172.html) | [Credits](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/214100.html) | [graphics and art by madsmurf](http://archiveofourown.org/works/642805)

**_SOLDIER DEFENDANT JUDGE_ **

**One: Stillness**

_“Well that’s not fair,” Wesley said, scratching the back of his head and putting his other hand in his pocket: the pocket where he carried his favorite knife, the knife that had always gotten him out of trouble in the past. It was a good knife, reliable and true, and he could do many things with it. He drew the knife, still in its scabbard, from his pocket, and then drew the knife from its scabbard. Light flashed off the polished black blade. “How is this supposed to work? There’s only one of me and there are too many of you._

_“We should do something about that.”_

Charles blinks, and draws in a slow breath. He thinks about turning the page. Obediently, the screen floating before his eyes shifts, and with that shift the scene that he can see in his mind changes, as well. From the confines of a study the hero of the story is now in some kind of underground room. He can almost imagine that he’s there with the boy named Wesley. He can almost hear the strange clicking sound that seems to haunt Wesley, that seems to follow him everywhere he goes.

 _Click, click,_ and the susurrus of something moving, something that Wesley hasn’t figured out yet, at least not at this point of this story.

In the scene, Wesley passes a multitude of broken doors. Some are made of glass, some are made of wood, some are made of paper, and some are made of bullets. 

Every door has a doorknob or a knocker of some kind. Some of them are still intact, and Charles thinks that Wesley could easily reach out and open a door, or at least find out whether it’s locked or not. Some of the doorknobs have been knocked askew, and there is at least one that is just barely still attached to its door.

Every doorknob has a length of white string dangling off it, that vanishes between the door and the floor of the corridor. Some of the strings flutter on a hint of a breeze, and some of the strings hang down, absolutely still no matter how violent the environment gets.

Some of the strings clearly used to be white but have since become too dusty or too bloody or too stained. 

Charles wonders how much Wesley already knows, and how much of _that_ he understands - and he wonders how much of it Wesley is ignoring, or refusing to take in.

He turns the page again - and then suddenly Charles can’t see the words for the sudden pain in his arm. It hits him like a lightning strike, hot and sharp, and he tries to unclench the fingers of that hand.

He can’t.

Charles groans, and it is a quiet sound in the stillness of the room. It is almost swallowed up by the blankness of sight and sound that make up his days.

And it’s going to be another one of them, apparently.

The pain in his arm vanishes suddenly - it’s like it was never there to begin with, and he catches himself still fighting the razor-wire sensations of it, sharp edges pressing into his nerves, enough to make him claw for his breath and try to scream. But as he tries to move his hand he finds that he can do so, easily; he curls his fingers into a fist and splays them out wide again.

And that’s when a pain in his feet flares up and overwhelms his senses - the same powerful pain, spasming this time, like a mouthful of blades chewing at him and into him.

There are days when Charles doesn’t need to resort to medication to deal with the many moments of pain that flash up and down his battered and fraying nerves.

This is not one of those days. 

He closes his left hand around the control stick and he pushes the button on top, and he counts through gritted teeth - four, three, two, _please work please work_ \- and finally, finally, his feet recede from his senses. At last the nerves go temporarily dead; they can still respond to him, however. He can wiggle his toes and not feel them moving at all. He can only see that he’s making them move. 

He’s gotten used to that feeling by now. It’s like the painful parts of him are being pulled away, very gently, but very unstoppably. The hurt ebbs away, sometimes all in a rush and sometimes over long slow intervals.

And that’s good, because he can forget that the pain exists. 

But there is a part of him that wants to be in pain, because that’s just about all he can feel. Being able to feel pain is still far better than being unable to feel at all.

He knows what it’s like to fall into that and struggle to get back up, and if there is anything Charles fears more than this morass of pain, it’s that slow slog back to himself.

He casts about for a new distraction, or to go back to an old one. How he wants to pick the book back up; how he wants to know if Wesley will even get into the fight that’s been building up for the past twenty pages. Does Wesley even know he’s heading for a fight? Does he know who he’ll be up against this time?

Charles sighs, and wishes he could shake his head - as much for himself as for a character in a book.

He closes his eyes - at least he has that, he still has that control - and he says, “Change, please. Snowy landscape, static view, Juliet Two.”

The words come out a little bit garbled, but the computer interface blinks at him once, and the pages of the book dissolve into a gray haze that lightens and turns a bright white.

The Juliet Two scenario is a winter’s landscape, as seen through floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Charles looks “out”, and he takes in bare dark branches splaying and spreading, a network of black threads reaching upwards into the gray sky. Directly in front of him at the virtual window is the trunk of the tree, about ten feet away; the branches begin to divide just below the top edge of his window.

The snow at the base of the tree is beautifully rendered in a thick layer, and here and there in the limited landscape it heaps up in aesthetically pleasing drifts and piles.

If Charles closes his eyes and concentrates, the computer will provide him with a simulated wind in the branches, and he can imagine that the wind is murmuring something he can understand. Poetry, perhaps, or the words to the songs he thinks he remembers from when he was a child. He vaguely remembers a voice introducing him to 21st-century popular music from all over the world.

Even though the music and the lyrics are all just in his head, Charles likes the Juliet Two scenario because it’s calm, and almost quiet, and it feels like he’s willingly walling himself up. He feels warm in this scenario, even though he’s looking out at a frozen place. He feels safe, and he feels like he can soak in the solitude.

Not that he’s _wanting_ for solitude – but this is the kind of solitude that he likes. Because when he’s not in a simulation of his choosing, when he’s just trapped in the confines of his senses, it’s a whole other kind of alone: it’s a crushing kind of alone, of second upon minute upon hour passing in monotonous lockstep. It’s alone like days and nights passing by unremarked and unremembered and unshared. It’s moments forgotten because each one is exactly like the last and each one is exactly like the next – except for when the time is consumed in pain and the subsequent drugged haze.

The medication wears off, and Charles holds his breath, hoping the scenario doesn’t get interrupted by his nerves going haywire again, and he allows himself a small sigh of relief when it doesn’t. 

The computer interprets his sigh as a prompt, and when he can focus on Juliet Two again, the snow starts to fall - a quiet drifting outside the glass window, a careful fall. The marvelous thing about this scenario is the snowflakes: images of fractal ice, mathematical iteration that looks beautiful in theory and magnificent in practice.

Charles’s little smile grows, because he has this, and now he can also move his right arm, and both of his feet. He can ignore the mutter of protest or foreboding in his nerves. That at least is a pain he’s come to live with - if not willingly, then at least with very little complaint.

That kind of pain is good, if only to tell him that his nerves can still fire correctly.

It’s just his stupid, cursed luck if they can’t work properly all the time.

If his nerves worked at all, he wouldn’t be in this situation, in any case.

Charles closes his eyes and doesn’t dismiss Juliet Two - he keeps seeing it faintly on the insides of his eyelids. 

Warmth, he thinks. After a scare like that he could certainly use some warmth. He presses another button. The bed hums, and he thinks he smiles, as the blankets draped over his torso and legs begin to hum and give off heat. It is pleasant and it makes him sigh, and perhaps feel content. Just a few degrees can make all the difference. 

He rolls his shoulders back into the bed, tries to get comfortable again, and he almost laughs in relief when his stomach rumbles at him.

Some things about being human are still rather inexpressibly nice: being hungry is good, and being able to satisfy that hunger is _excellent_.

His voice cracks around the edges even after he swallows, even after he takes a deep breath: “Hello?”

“Hello,” someone replies. A smooth, unobtrusive voice. Low musical rasp. There is a sound of the door opening and closing and opening again.

Charles watches as someone’s hands pull the virtual immersion headgear away: large hands with long and elegant fingers, and a blot of some kind of dark substance on the ball of the left thumb. He blinks, and while he’s doing that the lighting in the room dims a little, just enough so that he can look into the newcomer’s face without any difficulty.

The large hands belong to a smiling man, tall and gangly, with kind gray eyes and a wild wreath of blonde curls. The man is carrying a tray, and whatever is on the tray smells good.

Charles has seen him before, but it still takes him a moment to remember the man’s name; a few more minutes pass by before he can remember that he last saw the man about five days ago. Maybe five days, maybe six. He’s not too sure – time is a difficult thing to keep track of. 

Time is an idea he’s never really understood in his skin or bones; he only knows the dry, academic words behind it, and that is how it has been for him for most of his life.

“Hello, Tom,” Charles says politely. He remembers the here and now, and his hunger, and the odd welcome of this nurse’s smile, the bright spark in those sharp features.

“Hello, Charles. How are you feeling?” Tom asks as he adjusts the bed so that Charles can be supported sitting upright. “Does it hurt much today?”

Charles tries to shrug, and succeeds, although he can feel just one shoulder move. “I am...it is what it always is. Sometimes there is too much pain, and sometimes there is none.”

“Philosophical today, I like that,” Tom says. “If you’re feeling up to it, we can pick up from where we left off, in one of our older conversations.” He offers Charles a bite of sandwich, a sip of soup. 

He rolls the flavors around on his tongue: there’s a little too much black pepper in the soup, and someone has tried to compensate for it by adding lemon juice. The sandwich is fresh and tasty, the crusts a little singed around the edges, and there’s too much butter in it, which is just what Charles likes. 

Charles nods for the next bite, for the next mouthful. He’s had a long time to get used to being fed like this, and it’s much easier now than it was when he was much younger - especially when his right hand begins to twitch again, nerves misfiring, and he forces himself to look away from it and focus on his temporary companion.

Tom is sweating a little around the hairline, and Charles wonders about the effect that might have on the man’s curls. The hair on Tom’s arms is sparse, but it glows golden and copper in the muted light of the room. There is a faint ring of blue around Tom’s gray irises. Tom has a mark shaped like a running wolf on his left wrist, though its teeth are too large and too protruding and Charles has no idea which wolf species are even alive any more.

This is what happens, he thinks as he finishes the first half of the sandwich, when he’s left inside and literally alone to his own devices. Any length of it and he starts craving for contact, any kind of contact, and he clings to it when he gets it, for however long he gets it, for whatever length of time the other person or being is in the room with him. 

And he’s been here long enough to know what it’s like when he’s interacting with a human, or with someone who’s been cyberized, or with someone who never even began as organic at all.

There is something about that particular memory, that last one, that still makes Charles shudder. Not because he can’t or won’t interact with non-organic beings, but because of what he associates with that particular period of time. He thinks it’s unfair to remember non-organics in that context, and he doesn’t know what to do - all he knows is that though he doesn’t move in the here and now it still affects him. 

He’s distressed enough by the thought that he suddenly loses his appetite, and he shakes his head just a little when Tom offers him the next bite.

When that gets him a gently admonishing look Charles feels a little guilty - but his mood has been irretrievably soured and he thinks that if he tries to overdo it now he’s going to regret it, and sooner rather than later.

He doesn’t want Tom to leave, even for brief absences that are necessary for practical reasons, but he can’t control who comes and goes and he certainly never can tell when people will stay around him.

He does understand that people have to leave, though - and the bitterness of that understanding has had time to mellow, the sharp edges blunted now. It still hurts, but this kind of hurt is easier to bear, and to forget.

When the door closes behind the nurse and the tray with its half-eaten meal, Charles sighs heavily, and tries to catch his breath.

He thinks about Tom, who is likely to be mostly human. The scars on the nape of the nurse’s neck have long since faded: four small tell-tale holes, like the corners of a square. 

With the nurse gone, Charles shifts to another topic, and thinks about the science and the medicine of the process of cyberization: the degrees of it, the safety protocols and the procedures. He thinks about the pros and cons of various models of cyber-bodies, and he thinks about the various maintenance and upkeep and backup processes. He thinks about data security and about diving into the ’net, and of the various theories of consciousness floating in that strange everyplace that everyone can access, even him.

It’s supposed to be a way of taking his mind off his reality, away from the things that he already depressingly knows right in his very skin and bones, but there it is again - and this time, the memory comes back full force.

*

“...He’s crashing, I’ve never seen anyone crash like this!”

“What the hell is wrong with this kid - someone check his meds, he’s not supposed to be reacting to this stuff this way!”

“What the - there’s alcohol in his system...who gives booze to someone in this condition?!”

“He can’t stay here, we’re going to have to move him out – he looks like he can’t be more than sixteen – someone get his parents - !”

“That’s not a good idea, sir. Um, we have reason to believe it was one of the people in this house who introduced that substance into the patient’s meds. The nurses do not stay here; it’s the family who does...”

“Explain,” one of the voices says. 

Charles is almost gone, but he hears the strange deep cold in that voice and if he could be afraid now, if he could think through the haze of pain, he would be shaking.

The other voice starts out tentative, and then gathers strength as the words roll on: “The house in and of itself has a series of security measures that can only be activated or deactivated by the members of the family; it has to be them, and not the other inhabitants of the house. Modifications made to these security measures require confirmation from _everyone_ on the premises - except and unless a member of the family has command override codes.”

“Paranoid,” someone says.

“They should be,” someone else answers. “Family name.”

The tentative voice continues: “There are sensors and cameras all over the place, and there’s a panic room in the basement with all the data feeds. We’ve had one of the analysts sift the data from the past 12 hours. The person who came in here and did this to the patient isn’t anyone from the outside - family only.”

“Damn. Am I right in assuming the patient _is_ actually one of the family?”

“Yes, sir. One of the original DNA locks matches to him exactly. He also has a complete set of command override codes for all of the house’s systems.”

“Worse and worse. The patient’s got his own family after him, how wrong is that.... We’ve got to get him out of here, fast. Getting him back intact will be a problem for another day. Okay, intubate him, start giving neutralizers for the alcohol, take him out....”

Charles’s world goes completely black. There is no fear in him - no emotions at all. He chases that oblivion down. Anything to be away from the wildfire in his skin, his nerves all shot, all hooks and barbs and pulling. 

He wakes up some strange distant time later and he thinks it is all too soon - and the first thing he notices is that the light in the room is different. The room itself is different, but it smells all too familiar: disinfectant, sterile linens. The constant underlying stench of despair and of salt and of the iron in the blood.

The hospital room is bare and plain, and there is no virtual immersion apparatus in sight.

He tries to turn his head to the side so he can see more than just the cracked tiles of the ceiling.

Something flashes at him when he manages to catch a glimpse of the side table: a long golden strand caught up in the black wires of an old-fashioned audio delivery system. 

“Patient is now conscious,” an odd voice says, and Charles glances at the figure standing at the door: glowing green unblinking eyes, exposed cybernetic joints, large wheels, arms ending in three fingerlike projections. “Do you require assistance?”

“Um, yes,” Charles says. “Is that for me? The music player, I mean.”

“Yes. It was left for you by a visitor.”

“I had a visitor? Who?” He has no idea who could possibly want to see him. He knows nearly no one outside of the small group of nurses who look after him.

He doesn’t remember his father’s face, and he doesn’t want to remember his mother’s.

The less said of the man his mother married, the less said of that man’s son, the better.

“Unknown,” the robot nurse says. “Accessing visitor records. Data not found.”

“All...all right,” Charles says, because he doesn’t want to pursue that line of thought, not when he’s not really in the mood for either strange questions or difficult answers. 

“May I assist you, then?”

“Please,” and Charles watches with a sort of morbid fascination as the robot picks up the player. There is a certain delicacy to the way the pincer-like hands smooth out the cord, place the headset gently over Charles’s ears and hover over the chunky buttons. 

“I will turn the instrument on now,” the nurse says.

The music is unfamiliar: grinding and industrial with a very pronounced series of syncopated beats. It is nothing Charles has ever heard before. He actually almost tries to jump when an eerie wail starts up, but after several seconds of shock the sounds begin to blend together, he recognizes that the wail is just someone holding a very long and very high note, and it actually starts to become pleasant. 

The rhythm is something he’s almost familiar with.

A rhythm like his own heart, which fails and stutters sometimes and somehow manages to soldier on.

Pleasant enough to banish the surroundings, the smells and the clicking sounds that the robot nurse makes as it moves away.

The golden strand falls into Charles’s fingers somehow, and he forces himself to hang on to it, but it is long gone by the time he recovers from the alcohol poisoning.

*

Back in the here and now, time passes again for Charles, fluid and plodding at the same time. The seconds weigh down on him like minutes, the minutes like hours, the hours like days.

He loses time, as he often does - unable to tell how much has passed, in the face of the monotony. Nurses look after him, impersonal and brisk, and they come and go; faces and questions without a real rhythm. After a while he even stops missing Tom, after he’s suddenly called away, leaving Charles with nothing more than the hazy memory of a hasty but brilliant smile and the ghost of a heap of fresh flowers, the myriad pink petals tipped in white and exuding a soft spicy scent into the stale air of the room.

After a while, even Wesley’s adventures cease to have meaning for Charles. Even the continuing search for the music he’d once listened to becomes a chore, and he gives it up entirely as a completely lost cause.

Life becomes nothing short of tedious.

This is hardly the first time that he’s had to go through this kind of ennui. It seems to come and go for him: there are times that could almost be characterized as mania, for a given value of mania. These are the times when he reads books and absorbs all kinds of knowledge as fast as his mind and his uncooperative nerves will let him - these are the times during which he teaches himself about the ins and outs and the difficulties of the cyberization process; when he immerses himself in the diversity of human and machine communications, from ancient Japanese literature to German folk tales to a handful of the most commonly used programming languages; when he absorbs entire archives’ worth of world history and scientific literature.

When he’s manic like this, he can break down the code residing inside his virtual immersion system and rebuild it so the system itself becomes more robust and powerful and efficient. He can carry on conversations in several living and dead languages all at once, keeping up with the streams of information beamed in from all over the world. He can count himself among the world’s great minds, and he can keep up his pursuit of perfection for as long as he needs to, because his body has already given up but his mind will not be imprisoned and will continue to work for as long as he can, for as long as the work exists.

But the other side of mania is something more terrible: for Charles, that other side is silence, and a relentless crushing boredom. It’s lassitude. It’s being limp and nearly lifeless. It’s an agonizing, terrible awareness of the impossibility of being able to move independently. It’s the idea of loneliness that runs insidious and numbing down every last wretched inch of his useless nerves. Loneliness in the mind exacerbated by isolation of the body. There are some stretches of time in which even the memory of human touch recedes, and Charles doubts his senses as he always does, and doubts his mind besides. 

Loneliness and the crushing sense of being alone - _left alone_ , in every possible sense. Alone in his flesh and blood and bone, in a cage of frail and eroded matter, silently withering away.

Charles blinks awake in the virtual immersion apparatus and calls up another scenario - Quebec Nine, a summer cloudburst over a somber gray lake shore, just after the sun has completely slipped below the horizon. The washed-out world reflects his washed-out emotions almost perfectly, as does the ever-unreachable pulse of distant brightness from a lighthouse.

He’s always wanted to know what it would be like to stand out in that pouring rain.

As the beam of light swings over him and past him and repeats itself, slow rhythm like a silent metronome, the familiar sharp pain prickles and itches under his skin, flaring up in his fingertips. Spreading up both arms this time. 

Distantly, he can feel the bed shaking as he trembles in the grip of this fit.

This would have been bearable, he thinks, bitterly and not for the first time, if he could actually reach out and find someone to be with. Someone to sympathize with him. Someone to send him some kind of second-hand reassurance. If he could only get up, if he could only escape. Out, away, anywhere that isn’t here.

As it is, he can’t walk or move around very much, so that’s one avenue of escape closed off to him; and it is just as futile to think about sending his mind wandering through the reaches of cyberspace.

He doesn’t have that option simply and precisely because he is completely organic.

Cyberization, Charles thinks, vicious with hope and need and despair: the process of artificial augmentation leading to the integration of cybernetic technologies and capabilities into a human body. Micromachines, the _dennō_ protocols, the permanent connection to the Internet. He’s been through the literature several times and knows all of the standard surgical and related operations nearly forwards and backwards, and he is familiar with some of the variant methods practiced all over the world. He knows the risks and the multiple beta tests and debug processes almost by heart. 

He’s spent too many idle nights running the numbers.

And he knows damn well what he’s doing to himself, working out the probabilities of a procedure he desperately needs, and will most likely not have.

It’s not precisely suicide, but it comes very close to it.

In the years of dealing with this persistent neurodegenerative condition, Charles has become completely and intimately acquainted with his own private rage, until there are days when it’s all that drives him, when it’s all he can really feel or know - and that to him makes things _worse_. He doesn’t want to be consumed by this sick helplessness. That, more than anything would kill him, perhaps at the same pace as his disease, and perhaps even more slowly and painfully.

Sometimes, not even the things he knows are enough to save him from the bleak black nothing of his anger.

The knowledge he has isn’t really much, but it is all he has left, after he’s done suffering through his destroyed nerves, after he’s tried everything to make peace with his condition and resist it, after he’s done with the tedious and slow ebb of his terrible emotions: the knowledge that he would survive the transcription/transfer process. The sure certainty that the first thing he would do once he got the green light to get up would be to _leave_. 

The only thing he’s ever wanted, the thing he’s been denied for so long: freedom from this room, from this house, from this family.

Freedom from the prison of his broken organic self.

As Charles blinks away tears of pain and rage, the familiar faces he hasn’t seen in years appear in his memory, though he does his best to deny them. A woman with a wan, pallid face and worn, old eyes - time and tide and alcohol have leached all the color from her, the green of her eyes and the red in her cheeks and the fine ebony of her hair. Now she’s little more than a ghost with whom Charles shares certain physical features: the same prominent cheekbones, the same delicate bones in wrist and ankle.

A second face emerges: hazy, indeterminate, and fading away more and more with the slow march of Charles’s time. The deep blue eyes might have been familiar, once. Now they remain permanently closed even in his memories, and now that ghostly color is just the only remarkable thing in an otherwise plain face, one usually hidden behind papers or smudged with ink or backlit by pulsing white-green light.

There’s not much to remark on in the other two faces, other than that they are similar, and brutish, and ugly - and Charles curses those faces, unforgettable precisely because they’re so terrible. Tiny black eyes set close together, framed in faces seamed with premature wrinkles in the first face and crisscrossing scars in the second. Smiles that more closely resemble grimaces. The reek and volume of false or borrowed bravado.

They’re literally all the people he knows, aside from the whirl and temporary presences of his nurses, aside from the doctors who had once labored to save his life. The Xaviers and the Markos - he would call them his family, except that he knows that he will always and after say _but_ , since the word has long since lost all its meaning for him.

Born but ignored and then _buried_ , and worse. 

Forgotten. 

The virtual immersion apparatus is hooked into the house network, but he’s never had so much as a word from anyone living outside the door of his room. Not during the long and painful series of initial tests, conducted when he was still a little boy, which determined his condition and therefore pronounced his sentence; not during the plodding days of resignation and confinement and fighting to break free from his pre-adolescent body and his bed; not during the years after, growing used to the silence of this place, growing used to the strange tension of watching his limbs fill out and waste away at the same time.

Charles thinks he must be sixteen or seventeen by now. He’s sure the software in the apparatus is keeping up with him, is keeping track of him: knows about his appetite and his ideas and his wish that the writer of the Wesley adventures would hurry up with publishing the next installment - and he’s just as sure that the other people in this house have some kind of access to him, even if only at the distant digital remove of updates on his current condition.

And yet, knowing he’s here and existing and still fighting to stay alive, he’s not seen anyone _related_ to him in any way, and he can’t even remember who else in the family exists other than the ones who were/are/will be in this house.

When the shivering pain passes, the rage ebbs away and Charles is left weak and gasping again, is left with the silent sigh of his wrung-out self, and this is not the first time he’s wished he could end it. Just - there are days when that seems ideal, practical even: for everything to stop at last. For himself to stop at last. No more pain, no more rage, no more waiting in fear for the next shivershock of corrupted sensation; no more chemically-aided rest. Yes, he knows what it means; yes, he knows he still wants to enjoy the little pleasures, his little scenarios of Juliet Two and Quebec Nine and the ones he hasn’t even started testing yet: an entire folder labeled _Tango One-Six_. 

But there’s the lure of it. The impossible pull into it. Being gone, leaving nothing behind.

Terrible thoughts.

He hangs on to these ideas desperately, and he hates himself for hanging on, for being confused and torn between wanting to live and wanting to die. 

He honestly doesn’t know where he is in that crushing endless loop when he finally falls asleep, when he finally finds a breath of relief. 

**Two: Smoke**

The passage of time is unremarked, slow-creeping, until it’s suddenly not.

It’s not the screams that wake him up, because he can barely hear a thing outside the confines of this room. Sometimes he falls asleep to the rhythm of his own breathing, and sometimes the rhythms of that breathing are slow and easy and sometimes they are slow and labored. He still has his music player, and sometimes one of his nurses will show him some kindness and hook him in, will even go as far as tuning it to some station playing elaborate instrumentals and synthesized music.

It’s not the heat that wakes him up, because he’s been soothing his nerves with calming warmth. If he’s awake and dreaming or creating or immersing himself in his media, he can go for long periods of time without using the heating elements in his bed and blankets. Lately, however, the winter has been bringing record low temperatures, and he’s resorted to pre-emptive warmth. He’s already woken himself up once by shivering so badly that he triggered a full-body nervous attack, and isn’t really keen on repeating the experience.

It’s not the sudden flicker-thrum-almost silent pop of the virtual immersion apparatus going to sleep and lifting itself partly away that wakes him up, even though he should be paying attention to it. When he fell asleep he had been testing out the Tango scenarios one after the other, scrolling through endless lines of code and refining process after decision after enhancement. It’s not always easy, not the least when the programming is interrupted at unpredictable and irregular and painful intervals, but it’s good work. It’s the kind of work he can be proud of. 

No, what wakes him up after all is the light dancing outside his windows, even when he wakes up and a glimpse out of the corner of his eye to the clock in the corner of his computer interface reveals an unholy hour: it is past two in the morning on a bitterly cold winter’s night. There is no one in the room with him. His nerves are all quiet, for a wonder, and he is comfortable, and that almost never really happens with him when one or another of his senses or some rogue part of his body isn’t awake and on high alert.

Everything in the room seems to be flickering, leaving dancing impressions even when he squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again. There seems to be movement involved, an irregular back and forth across the glass - which is shimmering, throwing off bright flares. 

He squints, and presses a different button on his control stick, and the bed clicks and rattles itself into shaking motion. The movement allows him to sit up partway, and he manages to shift just a little so he’s not putting too much pressure on his own lower back. As soon as he catches his breath, as soon as he’s convinced he hasn’t just sparked off another attack of distressed or displeased nerves, he focuses on the window.

There is something feral about the lights outside. Something predatory. Light and shadow fighting for dominance. He can hear the distant boom and crackle of things breaking apart.

And it is getting warmer in here, even through the blankets insulating him.

The answer is so obvious that it takes him a long and frightening minute before he comes to it at last.

“No,” Charles whispers.

He is alone in his attic room. 

The house is on fire.

Now he can see the night and its stars shrouded in thick billowing smoke - and now, he can see that the room has been slowly filling up with it. Hazy outlines everywhere: the table where the nurses leave their things when they’re sitting with him. Tall shelves full of mint-condition books, a fortune in their bindings and paper and ink; priceless knowledge in the pages. His virtual immersion apparatus with all of its blocky planes. A glass of water with a red straw, half-empty, on the side table.

The smoke is rising slowly. Inexorably. Charles’s next breath is full of burning wood and charred electronics and melting glass. His ears are full of the crackle and hiss of the house weakening and falling down.

Something bangs open, loud in the terrible lull of what can only be death, and Charles turns wide, frightened eyes on the door to his bedroom - open now, probably warped by the heat of the flames. There is no shadow moving forward to announce someone coming in.

But maybe he can make them come in, if he makes them remember that he’s actually still here.

One last chance to be heard.

Charles takes a deep breath and begins to scream.

“I’m here I’m here get me out get me out please somebody hear me I’m here get me out I’m here I’m Charles Xavier get me out get me out get me out! _Please please please get me out - somebody anybody please - !_ ”

He never had much breath in him to begin with. The panicked screams taper off into a coughing fit, and every subsequent intake is short and full of agony. The smoke is closing in. The room is getting smaller and getting darker.

He tries it again, he repeats himself, until the little strength he has left leaves him in a last defeated gasp and he only has enough control to clench his pale hands into pale fists. His bones show white at the knuckles.

“I’m going to die here,” he says to himself.

A part of him tries to deny that knowledge: the rest of him welcomes it, and after he reconciles the two opposing ideas, after he accepts them both, things somehow seem all right. Charles has only been waiting for some kind of oblivion for years, and perhaps he will get it, now. True, this is the kind of oblivion that will _kill_ him getting there. He knows what it’s like to stop like this. He knows what it’s like to break for lack of breath and blood.

But he’s been immured here for so many years that he might as well have been left in the cold earth, occupying a bed precisely six feet long.

He might as well have the complete and absolute _nothing_ that is usually associated with a corpse in a casket and in a grave.

So he coughs and he cries, but he composes himself as best as he can. The bed protests when he makes it go back down to the standard horizontal configuration. 

Something in the house explodes, and the walls and the furniture in his room shudder in response, and the glass on the table tips over, rolls off. The crash is muffled by the carpet. The little water that had been in it is useless against the overheating.

Charles forces himself to _move_ , to make do with the little actions he can take: he eases himself back into his pillows, tries to settle into a good spot. He clenches and unclenches his hands and, for the first time in a long while, voluntarily lets go of the control stick. He has enough control over his nerves left to push the stick right off the side of the bed, where it clatters quietly against the bed frame. It is out of reach, and now he cannot grab at it if he should decide to change his mind at the last second.

He’s not in his virtual immersion apparatus, but he can remember the Tango Three scenario perfectly: to the last line of code, to the last visible pixel. He takes in a shallow breath, and closes his eyes, and _thinks_ \- and he can see it in his mind’s eye, almost perfect, almost complete. Bright blue sky meeting the bright blue sea at a horizon that is so very far away and nearly within arm’s reach at the same time. The gentle curve of the earth. Light everywhere, the sun almost at a summer’s zenith, shining and shattering on fine white sand. Rounded bits of seashell and rock and smooth crystal, like ten thousand universes the size of motes of dust, clinging to his fingers and to his feet. Palm trees providing a little shade, nearly black against the cloudless sky, their shadows just as dark on the bright ground.

However, this is the difference between the computing power of the processor unit in the virtual immersion apparatus, and the human frailty of Charles’s overtaxed mind: dreaming on his own, without the machine’s intervention, means that he can just barely duplicate the whisper and swoosh of the waves beating on the shore. He doesn’t have enough strength or ability left to imagine the warm breeze a place like this would have and deserve.

No matter. It’ll be enough.

 _This is going to hurt, and this isn’t going to be pretty,_ Charles thinks, and the scene in his mind is briefly interrupted by a flash of burnt and blackened skin, a glimpse of a hand ravaged and reduced to a skeletal claw, and everything around it reduced to ashes.

He shakes his head, shakes the image away, and he blinks again through watery eyes. He sees the ceiling as though through a luminous haze. Golden light is creeping in around the edges of his limited view, is flickering and breaking across his eyelashes.

It’s sort of the same kind of golden that that strand of hair was - the one caught up in the wires. He’d only seen it once, and has not had much occasion to remember it, but he sees it vividly now, and he thinks of that same kind of light wrapping around him now, as bright and warming as the imaginary Tango Three sun, and that’s when he takes in a last deep acrid breath and closes his eyes - for the last time, he thinks.

He thinks someone is calling his name, from very far away.

He wants to call back, but he can’t put any name to that voice. 

He opens his mouth, and tries to breathe - but he’s been taking in the thick smoke for a while now and there is a pain in his chest that grows and grows and clenches around his heart like a fist.

“Charles!” the voice cries.

 _I’m so sorry, I do want to answer you, but I can’t - I can’t breathe,_ Charles thinks, and then the world crashes into blank featureless black.

**Three: Synapse**

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Click. Clatter. Clang.

He tries to speak, but when he hears his own words dissolve into soft breaths he’s content to think the words to himself.

_So heavy._

_Like sleep and deeper than sleep._

_It feels so good, and I don’t know why._

The answer, when it comes, is unexpected and kind: “Please keep breathing,” someone says.

“Don’t be afraid,” someone else says.

As easy as that?

“We know what we’re doing, and looking at the amount of data you’ve accumulated, you seem to have a fairly good idea of it yourself.”

_Data on what? Specify subject, please. I have gigs of code and research and medical textbooks and, um, too many other things really._

“Keep him talking.” A third voice. As though this speaker expects to be obeyed instantly, without any hesitation or reservation. 

He might be confused, and he might be having problems with keeping up, but maybe that’s because this is the first time he’s ever been in a conversation with so many people before. It’s a strange swooping feeling, lighting his nerves up. It makes him so much more aware of his breathing, of the sweep and wash of sensation all around him.

He really hopes he doesn’t trigger himself again because he’s having - because he’s having fun, and because suddenly collapsing in on himself in tears will stop that fun in a hurry. 

“Red on the board - neural distress of some kind. If that trips the physical sensors it’ll be a job and a half to redo the synapse matches. Did anyone set him off?”

“No, I’m reading all vital signs stable for now. Maybe he did that to himself?”

“Damn.” The strong voice from earlier seems to come closer. “Whatever it is you’re remembering now - you’ll feel better if you stop thinking about it.”

_Tried that. Not sure it worked then._

“It will work now, or it will work better now. Just try. We’re kind of in the middle of a tricky process here, and you’ll help us if you calm down. Can you do that?”

_I’ll do my best._

There is a second series of beeps.

Someone heaves a gusty sigh of relief.

He’s not sure it isn’t him.

“Thank you,” one of the other voices says. “Maybe we can resume the conversation. Where were we?”

_I was asking you about the data you were referring to earlier - about the information that I had previously accumulated? Did you have a particular topic in mind?_

_And also, a tricky procedure? What is going on, please?_

There is no answer for a long time: at least, no one answers him directly.

He can hear, as if at a very far remove, a flurry of whispers. The voices rise and fall and the words are unintelligible. 

Agitation. Vehemence. Reason.

It recedes slowly.

He closes his eyes and he listens.

Beep and click and dripdripdrip.

A distant whir. An immediate pulse. A breath.

Behind his closed eyelids all he can see is an odd muted haze. Rippling currents of shadow. 

Strange to think that he’s even having this conversation, when he remembers closing his eyes and remembers darkness. He remembers groaning and crashing and shattering.

He remembers burning.

This time, however, he sinks: a far gentler fall, a far better silence.

He wishes he could smile.

He could almost enjoy this if this was his real death.

Something goes beep, and someone says, “Is he - ? Well, I guess he is. Patient is falling unconscious.”

“If it’s sleep, leave him to it,” one of the other voices says. “He’ll have enough time to do everything, later.”

*

_Death doesn’t want me._

Charles has a faint memory of being curled in on himself: arms wrapped tightly around his lower legs, forehead resting on his knees. An impossible position, of course. He’s rather sure he hasn’t been able to contort himself like that in years. That kind of movement would have been hell on his nerves, and would have likely caused enough pain to knock him unconscious if he’d decided to reverse the sequence of movements, if he’d decided to be flat on his back again.

He wakes up. Slow. Reluctant. It’s so difficult to open his eyes.

He looks up at the blank not-sky of the hospital room’s ceiling, and allows himself a moment of weakness: he pulls in a shaky breath, and he whispers, _“Fuck.”_

Fuck, but he’s _alive_. 

_How_ is he alive?

 _Why_ is he alive?

 _Please, no,_ he thinks, desperately.

These are the last things he remembers: his room in the mansion cracking and crackling all around him. Fire licking at the walls, light licking at his dazzled eyes. The smells of wood and stone and brick and wool, hellfire mixture, all-consuming. Faraway voices calling, a scrambled mixture of screaming and names.

He thinks, and he can feel the tears tracking down his cheeks.

If he’s here, if he’s really still alive after all, then the voices were real: someone heard him and responded to him. Someone took him out from the house, snatched the defeat of life from the jaws of victorious death.

The emotions cascade over him, one after another, until he’s shaking and the bed is shaking beneath him, until the feedback loop swings higher and higher. Until the twisting in his nerves rises and forces him to cry out, thin needy wail. 

Dejection. Defeat. Despair. 

A terrible disappointment that he cannot help but want to hold on to, and that he cannot help but feel guilty about.

But he can’t be happy to be alive, if for _alive_ he can just as easily substitute _confined_. 

There is a control stick in his left hand, dreary and familiar, except that there is only one button on it. 

He has nothing left to look forward to and nothing left to lose. 

He pushes the button.

He hears a soft chime, no doubt meant to be soothing.

Charles closes his eyes tightly, until they’re watering. He tries to clench his hands into fists, and he thinks he almost succeeds. He thinks he almost convinces himself that it hurts when his nails dig into his palms, and his nerves relay what seems to be the right message to his brain: five searing crescents of pain.

The red-haired nurse who comes in takes one look at him and goes out again, much more quickly. The hems of her loose trousers flutter as she heads back out at a run. Her shoes squeak loudly on the floor. 

Charles waits, because he’s used to waiting - but he doesn’t want to just wait and bear it, and he gives in to the sobs he’s been strangling in his throat. He turns his head to the side, and he can feel the warmth of his tears soaking into his pillow - and little by little the rest of him follows, curving into the bed at a nearly imperceptible pace. The bedding is thin but comfortable, and it cradles him easily.

It hurts a little as he moves, but he’s doing it somehow, and he ignores the pain and focuses on every wet and shaky breath. He keeps moving, and he gathers his tears in his cool dry palms.

_Slowly. Cover your face. Don’t let anyone see you crying. Impolite. Wipe your nose._

He does.

“Charles Xavier,” someone says.

He knows this voice. This person has spoken to Charles before, and still sounds like command and control and competence. The leader’s voice from earlier, from when he was having that strange conversation cut short.

Eventually Charles catches his breath and lowers his hands back to the creased sheets. Slowly, he turns his head and looks up, and when he does he finds himself looking up at a smile that is equal parts perplexed and concerned. A kind face, almost reminiscent of Tom’s, except that this doctor has more lines in the squared-off planes of his face, and long dirty-blonde hair tied back at the nape of his neck. He has several hours’ worth of stubble and, for no good reason that Charles can fathom, water-stained sleeves.

“Hello, Doctor,” Charles says, because he has to be polite. Because he can still remember to be polite even while he thinks that he no longer wants to be alive.

“Call me Chris. I take it you’re not feeling all too well? It should pass.” The man smiles and puts his hands in his pockets, distorting the lines of his surgical shirt. “But I’m impressed at your current progress - you were moving very naturally just now. That doesn’t happen instantly or easily, you know, when we’re talking about cases like yours. Usually there’s coaxing and encouragement of the rather more belligerent sort involved: hard to convince people that their circumstances have changed, after all, when they’ve only lived with the old condition, and had all the time to endure it and get used to it.”

Charles schools his face to blankness.

What he really wants to do is scream, but this is what he makes himself say, instead, as calmly as he can: “Perhaps you’re mistaken, doctor, because there’s no hope for change with the condition I have. And I don’t know why you’re talking about movement - there isn’t much I can do, really. Or if I can manage to move, it’s only to trigger my nerve spasms, and I’d rather not move because I really am not much for excruciating pain.”

“All of that was true before you got here. Now is a very different story, now that you’ve woken up.”

Charles shakes his head very slowly, very carefully.

“I’m not joking,” the doctor insists, and he tugs the tie out of his hair and puts it back in. Slow, controlled movements. 

Charles is very, very envious of that easy movement, the graceless flex of muscle and sinew and skin.

There’s a noise at the door and the nurse from earlier comes back in, carrying something flat and large and squared-off in her hands. 

“Ah, that was exactly what I asked for, thank you,” the doctor says, and as he takes it from her and turns it, Charles can see the item for what it really is: a big mirror of some kind, perhaps enough to see head and shoulders and chest in. Briefly he wonders what purpose a mirror like that could have in a hospital.

“Please, Charles, will you look in this mirror for me?”

He does.

The quick glance he throws into the mirror becomes a profound stare, and he still doesn’t know what he’s looking at, because the image is of a complete stranger yet at the same time someone who he is intimately familiar with, and he can’t believe his own eyes.

He’s been flat on his back for nearly as long as he can remember.

The Charles he sees now is - lying on his side, curled up naturally. As if it’s that easy. As if it doesn’t hurt.

He blinks and pushes the big picture away. It’s too much impossibility to take in. He has to start small. 

He focuses on the details.

Here is his own face. Hair at once dark brown and copper, pushed back in tousled waves from a broad forehead. Pale skin peppered with freckles, like dark stars in a white sky. He thinks he remembers seeing the two prominent dots high on the bridge of his nose, once, the last time he’d asked to look at himself in a mirror.

He remembers that day, and remembers the pinch of worry in Tom’s smile - one of the many times Tom had sat with him through the long slow minutes, one of the many times they’d read silently side by side if not comfortably, wallowing in Wesley’s adventures of knife and gun and wound and what seemed to be some very old literature on Tom’s handheld device, if the images of yellowed pages and uneven ink were anything to go by. 

Charles remembers the shivering sensation he felt when he looked at his reflection in a much smaller mirror, held in Tom’s chapped hands. He looked at himself so rarely because he knew his own face from the inside, from the nerves and muscles animating it - a set of nerves and muscles that were also affected by the same wayward haywire impulses that left the rest of him helpless and hurting. 

He remembers lying flat on his back and looking up at his own face. He remembers most prominently the creases in his forehead, like consternation and confusion and shock all tumbled together. He remembers thinking or hoping that it would be a long time before he could look at himself again, because he couldn’t bear to linger on the pain etched into the lines around his eyes and mouth - already permanent, already deepening - already fixed in a face so young.

But the face that looks back at him now is almost exactly the same as the face in that memory. _Almost._ So close. The old wrinkles have all been smoothed away: the old ghosts of pain and endless worry and concentration. In their place is a fine network of straight lines in near-translucent dark gray, mapped to follow the slopes of his cheeks, his crooked nose, the cleft in his chin beneath a dark-red mouth.

Charles looks into his own blue eyes and he can sense that something is not _right_ about them, something that doesn’t quite ring true to his admittedly limited experience of human faces, but he’s having a hard time determining what that is exactly.

And then the doctor - Chris - says, “Lights, please,” and Charles blinks as the nurse waves her hand at a blue-glowing panel near the door.

The room is plunged into a near-complete darkness that is relieved only by the sparse light coming in from the corridor.

And Charles is still looking at himself in the mirror, watching himself in utter fascination - or rather, watching his own eyes adapt to the change in his environment.

There is a thirty-pointed star surrounding the view he’s taking in through each eye. Nothing natural about that at all. Charles’s mind scrambles for the implications. Thirty points surrounding the opening of the pupil - that means fifteen blades, and an aperture surrounded by blades can only mean an iris diaphragm widening to take in all available and ambient light. 

Eyes with an iris diaphragm, meaning artificial eyes of a type he’s only read about before, and that only in whispers and speculation.

Top of the line.

And if he has artificial eyes, and apparently artificial skin if the fine lines running underneath his skin are anything to go by, meant to be straight and warped by his own bone structure, what else is artificial? What else has been done to him? 

Is this even his own actual face after all? Is this the jut and slope of his own skull? Is that the real blue of his original eyes?

And what of his limbs and the rest of him?

Charles says, “Please turn the lights back on,” and now that he’s watching for the movement in his own eyes he can see the “stars” shrinking to adjust to the sudden brightness, see the near-perfect circle of the pupil moving from within. 

It leaves him confused and frightened and exhilarated and cautious all at once, enough to leave him slightly tongue-tied - but he manages to speak again: “Doctor.”

“Call me Chris, I said,” is the somewhat exasperated reply.

Charles thinks he actually sees the nurse roll her eyes, but she is still standing right behind the doctor, so he cannot catch all of her expressions. 

“Chris. All right. If you insist.” Charles takes a deep and steadying breath and he doesn’t really want to ask this question, but he thinks everything in him must be straining toward some kind of answer, the answer that had been hinted at in his strange-and-familiar eyes. In the end, all he can say is, “What happened to me.”

“You can move,” Chris says, as though it is simple, as though he is talking about something trivial: an answer that is a punch in the gut and is all the spasms in his old nerves; an answer that is unutterably hateful and thrilling all at once. 

Charles closes his eyes.

And for the first time in years he thinks to himself, _Move._

He can feel the vibrations rippling through his skin, jerky and alien and unmistakably _him_ , and he doesn’t know what to feel when his body obeys that command, easily, without any protest. He uncurls from the bed, from the way he’d been holding himself in a fetal position, and slowly, carefully sits up. Nothing hurts. He only has the flash of his memory to remember the old pains and aches by. 

He’s moving. He just sat up in bed without needing or asking for any help. His muscles are working and there is no pain accompanying the work, nothing roaring or hissing down his nerves. 

Charles doesn’t have to look in the mirror, which the doctor is still holding up, to know that his eyes are wide open and his pupils have dilated in shock. 

He can move. The doctor is right.

Charles catches his breath, staggered by the simple truth, and the next question comes out through his gritted teeth: “I - what did you do to me? _How_ did you do this to me?” 

He watches Chris raise an eyebrow; the doctor looks completely perplexed. “I - well, all right, they’re your medical records, and I have to discuss them with you, and we might as well start now. Okay,” and Chris crosses to the chair at the bedside. He drops heavily into it. “Charles Xavier. You were brought to this hospital as a direct result of the fire that broke out at your house - oh, about a week and a half ago now. When they wheeled you in here, you were in very bad shape; you presented with the kind of prognosis that meant nothing good. So it was a very good thing that your charts had been updated to include a very specific set of instructions, in case your condition deteriorated past a certain threshold or you were at death’s door. 

“It was pretty obvious that by the time you got here to the hospital you had crossed those two threshold possibilities. I’ll spare you those gory details; you can look them up on your own, when you’re ready. For us, it was just a simple and specific process of following the instructions in your chart. You underwent the complete cyberization process; we’ve replaced certain sections of your autonomic controls and also augmented the basic set of nanotech interfaces already existing in your brain. We were able to save most of your optic nerves and the most important pieces of your spinal column - or, at least, those crucial sections that hadn’t already been eroded or left useless by your previous condition.

“Those nerves are now linked to your body, which, as you can see for yourself, is a complete and fully mobile prosthesis. Top of the line cyborg chassis and a complete set of human-appearance modifications, which basically boils down to saying that your hair and your skin are both as close to their original appearances as we could make them. Everything’s in good working order - muscles, joints, the internal power cords and conduits as well as the recharge points for the engine that powers your artificial body in place of your cardiovascular organs. A full complement of state of the art sensory systems, all of them completely and seamlessly integrated with your cyberbrain.”

The doctor looks uncomfortable even as his explanation tapers off into silence.

Charles wonders what he looks like, because he feels the shock all over again. The incredulity is back, and at such a high pitch that he is badly tempted to start laughing hysterically.

What the doctor is describing is nothing less than _impossibility_.

The nurse coughs, quietly, and as if prompted, Chris starts talking again, if a little bit faster than before. “Naturally we installed the nanotech that allows you to connect to many of the public-access computer networks and a few extra that were explicitly specified in the addendum to your chart - which means that you can get to the most recent backup of the data from your virtual immersion apparatus, no problem. Among other things. I have to admit, I thought you were joking when you said you had accumulated a lot of data on certain subjects in both the general and specialist sense, but. Well.” He shifts uncomfortably in the chair. “As I said. You’re out of your organic body, and to the best of our ability and knowledge, you’re still _you_ \- only now you’re in an artificial casing, which is, moreover, one that now grants you total freedom of movement, and total freedom from pain.”

Charles takes a deep breath - and it occurs to him suddenly that he might not actually need to _breathe_ to stay alive at this point. It doesn’t stop him from doing it again, and it doesn’t stop him from putting his hand over where his heart ought to be. 

_Something_ purrs beneath his hand, beneath his skin, a soothing rumble for all that it is entirely strange and foreign to him: it is nothing he’s ever felt before, and it is something he knows rather a lot about from all his study of the cyberization process.

Which puts this entire preposterous idea back at the very forefront of his mind, and he _stares_ at the doctor. He can feel and _see_ his own eyes moving as they focus on the older man and on the way he’s worrying the hems on his surgical shirt, the waterlogged fabric of his sleeves - and after a moment, Charles’s brain catches up with him and he remembers the sounds of liquid and flow: cyborg manufacturing processes. The exoskeletons are built in a specific series of sealed, immersed environments. People think nothing of using a machine to install a cyberbrain into a mobile prosthesis, but there are some people who still do this work by hand, and it might stand to reason that this could be the preferred procedure to follow in a hospital setting such as this.

Charles carefully sets that train of thought aside and focuses on the important questions. “And now, doctor, I suppose you will tell me that I must find some way of...paying my debts? I cannot imagine that you did all that work pro bono. And knowing my old condition, it would have to have been a lot of work, a lot of man-hours to put in.” He remembers the disjointed conversation, one of the other voices - a doctor-technician? - murmuring about syncing.

Chris actually looks shocked. “What are you talking about? All right, so you must have a million questions about all of this, but why focus on _that_?”

“I have no assets in my own name,” Charles says. “Surely you were apprised of this before you began your work. I may have a family name that is held in high regard, but I myself have been relegated to oblivion by that family, and to the best of my knowledge, I have never had any access to the assets held by that family. I’ve been _disowned_ , and I can provide you with that documentation....”

“This is ridiculous, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the doctor says, exasperated. “You heard me mention a specific set of instructions earlier: you should have access to our databases, and to that document. I’m not the person who should be discussing this with you: but you’re Charles Xavier, and you have control of and access to everything your family has left behind.”

“My...family,” Charles says, slowly. Perhaps it’s a little late to ask, but he does so anyway. “Did any of them survive the fire?”

“No.” Both doctor and nurse look weary, now. “Only one of them was brought here, and she was only barely just alive - we fought for hours to save her, but she eventually succumbed to the shock and the extent of her injuries. Sharon Xavier.”

“Sharon Marko,” Charles corrects, heavily. “Who swore that she would not let any of the family’s holdings or assets pass to me. Tell me, doctor, how can I be the Xavier heir, when I was written out of all of their wills a long time ago?”

“It’s in your chart,” Chris says, heavily, “which I recommend you peruse at your earliest convenience. I imagine that after this conversation it will be one of your priorities. Since you asked: read your updated medical history. Read our notations and addenda, including the build progress reports and software documentation and the maintenance directives for your prosthesis. Save the legalese for last: the orders regarding your cyberbrain and the transfer notes; the instruments for transfer of control of all assets.

“At this point, we can just recommend that you begin to make plans for your own course of physical rehabilitation. You have been inactive for a very long time, and that is the default state your nerves and brain are aware of. You are going to have to start getting accustomed to your changed circumstances: you are going to have to learn to live with your new body, with your new capabilities. Perhaps _reconciliation_ is not the best or strongest word for your current state, but that is part of what you have to work on now. You’ve just undergone a complete change of life, and you need to start working with your new parameters.”

“...Alone, doctor?” Charles asks.

It’s the woman who replies, firm and knowing and kind all at once. “No.”

Charles watches her cross the room in three strides.

When she’s standing on the opposite side of the bed from a hassled-looking Chris, she holds out her hand, and Charles takes it, instinctively. 

“You can look at my fingers, it’s all right - I asked to be left looking like this,” she says.

Charles takes in her hands - the one he’s holding and the one she’s placed on the bed, palm up, fingers curled loosely together.

Shapely hands, battered and calloused fingertips, almost and yet not at all similar to Tom’s. She has no fingernails; the digits simply taper off to natural-looking, elegant points, maintaining the appearance of an ordinary human hand. 

And now that he’s noticed that, he can see and sense the rest: the too-regular whorls and ridges of her fingertips. The relentlessly right-angled points where her fingers bend to create artificial knuckles. The lines missing from her palms. Flexible artificial skin stretched over the joint mechanisms, and easily visible screws and bolts.

“You said that you want your hands to look like these - what happened to you,” Charles asks.

“The opposite of what brought you here, actually,” she says. “Frostbite. I very nearly lost my feet, too. Luckily those nerves were saved.”

“I presume not without difficulty.”

“You presume correctly, Charles Xavier.” The nurse moves, and she wraps her hands around his wrists and _pulls_ at him, steady coaxing pressure, until Charles has no choice but to half-slide and half-fall out of the bed.

Until he has no choice but to stand up - and this is an action he has not been able to perform in far too many years. He thinks he might not manage to stay upright. He’s still half-afraid that he’s just dreaming or hallucinating, that any moment now the pain will come back and he will collapse - and he thinks that the despair of it would be on a par with the humiliation.

He’s about to look down at his feet, but the nurse says in a firm and commanding tone: “No. Look at me, please. And now - step. Come forward onto your right foot. Redistribute your weight.”

“I - ” Charles almost says “I can’t,” but a glance at the nurse’s hands brings a strange kind of encouragement, and he does as she says - he might close his eyes, but he makes that step. 

“Yes. Now the other. All right, stop. Stand still.” And then she adds, “I’m going to let you go now. You are not going to fall down.”

“I don’t know about that,” Charles says quietly. He’s nearly undone with embarrassment and fear and _joy_. “I don’t even know if I was ever able to take any steps, to walk normally, when I was a child. I can’t really remember - and I’m not sure I should.”

She gives him an indifferent shrug - and lets go. “That was the past. This is now. This is you, standing up. Learning to walk. It’s enough to start with, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he says, after a while, still standing easily on his own.

It’s even the truth, and Charles lets his relief show.

“Good. So that is your first lesson, or at least half of it. The other half will be for you to turn around and walk back to your bed, and then to get back into it. Unassisted,” she adds. “If you do that, I’ll tell you my name, and the doctor and I will leave you to your thoughts.”

“And rehabilitation?” 

She smiles, and there are strange scars and lines all around her mouth and eyes - but somehow, despite them, because of them, she’s beautiful. “Well, we’ll see how you do in the morning – when you can make it to the windows without my help,” and she jerks a thumb over her shoulder, “then perhaps we can start pushing a little bit more. We can go outside this room, and perhaps outside this building.”

With a start Charles notices the closed curtains hanging over a set of floor-to-ceiling windows, eerily reminiscent of both his old quarters and the “view” in Juliet Two.

It is very difficult to turn his back on them, because he hasn’t had any real idea of the outside world for a long time, but Charles takes a deep breath and begins. He is highly conscious of the nurse’s eyes on him and of the doctor’s, both of them closely watching his progress.

The turn is a little awkward, and he overbalances just a little and has to backpedal once, but he’s soon facing his bed again, and he crosses the distance in a handful of small steps. 

Climbing back into the bed is a little awkward, and he hangs off the railings for a moment, but he finally succeeds in face-planting into his pillow. He stays there for a few moments, and then shifts around to lie on his back again.

“Excellent,” the nurse says, and she holds out her hand to him again - the right hand, this time. “I’m pleased to meet you. My name is Anna. And I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”

Charles grips her hand as best as he can without hurting her, and wonders what his smile must look like at this moment. 

“I add my congratulations to hers, as well as the best of luck for the beginning of your necessary task – you’re going to need it,” the doctor says. Charles watches him move briskly to the door. “If you require anything, just press the button again, and someone should come and see to you. Oh - and food, of course, I imagine you’ll be needing some kind of sustenance. I’ll send someone to explain it to you. See you in the morning.” He leaves, then, and Anna follows him out, nodding and smiling encouragement before the door closes on her.

The door swings open again soon enough, and the man who walks in looks sleepy and harried all at once, but he’s quick on his feet and both efficient and helpful for all that. He helps Charles settle back into his blankets, and hands him a bar-shaped object wrapped in foil. 

Charles tilts the bar this way and that. A plain white label. “This is...food?” Charles asks.

“After a fashion,” the man says around what looks like a jaw-breaking yawn. “Chart says complete artificial prosthesis, including your sensory organs? And _especially_ including your taste buds? Then you should be able to eat that without running into any problems. I mean, you ought to eat it, you kind of don’t have a choice, since from now on it’s pretty much the only kind of solid food your systems will be able to process. Nutrient delivery system and not much of anything else. Open up, chew, swallow, and don’t taste it, is what I’d suggest.”

“You’re saying that it doesn’t taste nice.”

The man grimaces. “I’m not saying anything. That, you can find out on your own. Shouldn’t be that bad, with the state you’re in. If you were still partly organic, you might run into a few problems. As for me, I’d rather have, you know, _food_ food.”

Charles smiles politely as the nurse ambles out, whistling under his breath. He tears the foil open as carefully as he can, still trying to understand his own strength, his own new abilities, and nibbles at the end of the bar - which doesn’t really taste like anything. It certainly doesn’t taste offensive at all.

He eats slowly, contemplatively, and thinks about what the nurse said: there are more important things to consider, but this is rather more completely immediate. This is all the food he can have now, the nurse had said. Charles wonders about the tradeoff: now he can move around, now he doesn’t have to live with pain, but now there’s nothing for his hunger but this bland sustenance. 

He thinks briefly about his old meals, the soups and the sandwiches, small portions. A series of things to look forward to, through the slog of the days. The idea or possibility or thought of something new, something different, every time; a means of marking time, a means of remembering specific days and moments. Gone now, and in any case the kitchens must have been reduced to ash as well.

He wants to think about that topic. It must be at least as pressing as the idea of him being here at all, at being in this prosthesis.

But time, time, he must have time ahead of him, since he has to have time to undergo the rehabilitation process.

Charles knows the feeling of being restless; knows what it’s like to have so many things pressing down on his shoulders and yet be trapped in inaction.

But the difference now is that he no longer has any reason to remain inactive. More precisely, he now has the means to take action. It’s already a huge leap forward, a huge difference from the time in which he had no solutions at all, and no choices.

So he sets the legalese aside for now and he sits up, and he looks at his hands and at his feet and from there to the windows. He doesn’t have to wait for the morning to look out at the world, after all.

Standing up on his own two feet still seems unreal, and he thinks it might still take him a long time to get used to the very idea – much less the idea of being able to walk, and do so many other things related to movement.

He thinks of Anna’s words, and he keeps his eyes on the thick curtains. 

He reaches out and the cloth creases in his hands.

Charles closes his eyes and pulls the curtains apart.

An overwhelming impression of lights on the ground and lights in the sky. A skyline he’s only seen in virtual reality, sprawling out before him in all of its strange glory, light pollution and neon all the way to the horizon that he can see.

He squints doubtfully at a tower and the first thing he notices are the hands telling the time: it’s 7:19 in the evening.

Belatedly, it clicks in his head: he’s in London proper, he’s somewhere near the City of Westminster, and he’s looking at Big Ben. It still exists. It’s been perfectly preserved or restored - the details don’t matter, only the fact that it’s still working, and that it’s tall and _there_ and still beautiful.

It’s a good reminder: there is still a world outside of his mind. 

After another moment it occurs to him that he’s going to be expected to rejoin it.

As frightening a thought that is, it also fills him with a rising courage.

He’s always been determined, he thinks.

What he’s about to do, however, is going to require a different kind of determination.

**Four: Stride**

“One foot in front of the other,” Anna reminds him.

Phantom pain in his feet: not at all easy to ignore precisely because there is no real source or reason for it. 

Charles takes a deep breath, and keeps moving forward.

His eyes are on the corner up ahead, where the open gallery curves gently to the right and then starts going down, following the slope of the hill on which the hospital is located.

When Charles gets to the corner, he takes an extra step to the left. The squared-off column is warm even through his layers: he looks a little ragged, and both his shirt and his trousers are a little too long for him, but he can’t really complain because at least the clothes prevent him from feeling the slight nip in the afternoon breeze.

That doesn’t stop him from jamming his hands into the pockets of his slightly oversized trousers; doesn’t stop him from trying to stay out of the wind.

“You still feel cold,” Anna murmurs as she walks to the column opposite. Her hair flares brightly even in the weak sunlight. 

“I’m surprised by that, honestly,” Charles says. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I’ve been laboring under a delusion pertaining to cyborg bodies.”

Anna’s lips curve into a thin sliver of a smile. “You wouldn’t be the only one, honestly. We get these kinds of questions all the time. I’m sure you’re aware that there are brochures, that there are reference materials you can easily access – but people still prefer the personal touch, as it were.”

“That must be tiring for you and for the doctors.”

“These are questions that need to be answered, and I’m sure you are aware of the reassurance that people can draw from getting the answers that they need.” she says, and offers him a shrug. “That goes for you, too. You should ask me questions. I am not just here to crack a whip at you.”

“So explain that to me first,” Charles says. “Obviously I still feel cold, so it stands to reason that this prosthesis reacts to outside temperatures.”

“And?” Anna raises an eyebrow. “You have nerves, yes? They are completely artificial nerves in your case, but you still use them to interface with the rest of the world. It makes sense for them to be calibrated to do that job exactly – and it makes sense for you to continue to rely on them to know how your body is doing relative to the outside world. Even cybernetic bodies break down when used in non-optimum conditions.”

“And the cybernetic body is the protection for the cybernetic brain, which operates under a narrower set of tolerances. I see,” Charles says. He examines his hands and fingers for a moment.

“Shall we keep walking?” Anna says.

“Please,” Charles says. “Um, all right, next question. The first night after I woke up, the doctor – Chris – he sent someone in with food.”

“For a certain value of _food_.” She laughs quietly.

“That’s what the other nurse said. I didn’t perceive anything wrong with the nutrient bar, even when I compared it to what I used to eat.”

“That’s a blessing,” Anna says. “A person in an organic body needs to take in specific nutrients in order to keep that body going, with the bonus that the process can be and often is pleasurable. A person in a cyborg body, and particularly one in a complete prosthesis, will still need the same materials, for the same reasons – maintenance and sustenance – but that particular intake process no longer has any pleasure associated with it.” She looks amused. “Science needs to march on with that one.”

“So we can put together the _dennō_ protocols and refine them to the point where we can safely take a person out of his or her damaged or inadequate organic body – but we can’t create palatable fuel for cyborgs.” Charles grins a little. “It’s a bit of a joke if one thinks about it too much.”

“Isn’t it?” And Anna produces a nutrient bar from her own pocket. 

Charles watches with fascination as she grimaces over every bite, and then: “How often do you have to eat those, if you are only partly cybernetic?”

Anna crumples the wrapper into a small ball and pitches it at the closest garbage can – it sails six feet in a near-perfect arc and drops in smoothly. “Once a day, and it’s a struggle every time. It seems as though I cannot get used to it, or at least learn to tolerate it. At least I can console myself with home cooking.”

“I’m going to miss that eventually, aren’t I.” It’s Charles’s turn to eat, and he demolishes his portion quickly and efficiently. He’s hungry; they’ve been working and walking for the better part of the morning, getting him used to the movements he’d already forgotten. It’s slow going, though not without its rewards and encouragements, not the least of which is the world itself, a massive change from three walls, a floor, a ceiling, and a set of windows. 

Anna wrinkles her nose in apparent distaste for the nutrient bar, but the humor in her eyes doesn’t seem to stay for very long, because then she shoots him a comprehensive, all-evaluating glance. “I’m not really sure you’re just talking about that thing in your hand. I know that you’ve been working through your charts. That you’ve started looking up information on estates and property. So that means you’re working on some pretty heavy things. Let me ask you, is there anything you _do_ miss now?”

Charles stops. They are standing in a patch of sunshine. London is spread out before them. There are other patients walking in the courtyard and in its surrounding galleries. He thinks he might like to stand on the grass and see what it feels like under his bare toes.

Anna simply raises an eyebrow when he steps out of his shoes and walks off the paved path - but after a moment she doesn’t just join him. She sits down cross-legged in the grass, leans back on her hands, and looks at him expectantly until he follows suit, though he sits more than an arm’s length away.

He doesn’t really know where to start, at this point. She’s right in that he has been staying up through the nights. The amount of paperwork and legal documents surrounding the _idea_ of the Xavier family alone is staggering: most of it having to do with the disposal of the estate of Brian Xavier. The documents record the remarriage of his widow, Sharon, to Kurt Marko; and the latter’s efforts to seize control of the estate.

Charles shakes his head, thinking about the very strange experience of looking up his own birth certificate: _Charles Francis Xavier, born to Brian and Sharon Xavier_. It feels a little like a repeat of his experience of looking in the mirror after the fire. There are details that he needs to look up in other databases, such as the continuing changes to international citizenship law after the Third and Fourth World Wars. 

Thanks to his father he apparently has an American citizenship; and thanks to Sharon he has a British one.

He’s trying very hard right now to avoid thinking about his own medical records, about the set of orders that Chris had mentioned on the day he got up. That’s a mountain he intends to scale soon, but he’s going to want to brace himself for it.

At the very least, however, looking at his birth certificate allows him to determine how old he really is. After years of not really caring due to his condition and the limitations it imposed on him, his age was merely a distant marker of time passing him by, completely unremarked and completely irrelevant. Now, he’s a little surprised to know that he’s just one month shy of his nineteenth birthday. 

Anna coughs beside him. 

Charles starts. The sun is a little lower in the sky now. London’s lights are beginning to come on, and as he watches, he can see the spotlights pointing to the faces of Big Ben. He looks over at the nurse, and attempts a sheepish smile. “I...forgive me, I’ve been very rude.”

She smiles, and gets to her feet, and extends a hand to him. “I’m glad you picked this place to stop and have a think in - it was comfortable, and it’s always good to sit in the sun. I try to keep warm as much as I can, and that at least was no hardship at all. But you haven’t answered my question yet.”

“I don’t really know that I have an answer for you right now, other than the obvious: I think I miss soup and fruit juice. I might miss eating sweet things after all, like custard, even though I did not get to eat that very often when I was – stuck in bed,” Charles says, as diplomatically as he can.

“I can answer the part about liquids at least,” Anna says as she leads him back toward the hospital. “You should be able to consume many of those without any trouble. Cyborgs drink beer, too, you know. So fruit juice shouldn’t be a problem, or coffee or tea. _And_ you’ve reached your age of majority, so you can go and get a pint, or order something stronger. Your systems will be able to process those substances without any problems.”

“But soup,” he says, and makes a face.

“That, you’ll have to ask about.”

Charles sighs, and when they make it back to his room he walks past the bed and goes to sit in the chair, which he’s moved from the bedside to a spot next to the windows. 

“Cooldown exercises, come on, you’re not going to get out of those,” Anna says.

Charles nods and sits down properly, braces his left foot on the floor before reaching for his right ankle. The stretch on either side of his knee is pleasant and warming. 

Anna counts off the seconds for him, and then she makes a circling motion with her finger. Charles switches to the left leg. “Now flexion exercises. Knees, good,” she says in that quiet encouraging way of hers. “Hips next.”

Which all really ends with Charles curled up in the chair, arms curled loosely around his raised knees. He plants his chin on his left knee and offers Anna a shrug. “And after this?”

“It is good to set goals sometimes,” she says after a moment’s thought. “You’re in a pretty sturdy prosthesis. You can do whatever you want; the body’s there for you to use however you see fit. People take up yoga or boxing or gymnastics. They learn to run marathons and longer distances. Some people ask to have their artificial bodies adjusted and recalibrated in order to take up swimming. There are new combat forms and martial arts that take advantage of artificial and augmented limbs.” 

“How do I start with, say, the last thing you mentioned? Martial arts?”

“Two-pronged approach,” she says. “You download the software so you know what you’re doing on the cerebral level. Then you start moving so you can understand it in your muscles.”

“It sounds simple,” Charles says.

“It’s movement. Which is something most of us can do without really thinking very hard about it. But for someone like you, these are, for all intents and purposes, your first steps. So you start small, and you master the simple movements, and you use the simple movements to learn the more complex ones.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

Anna laughs. “I wouldn’t be much of a nurse or a coach if I couldn’t do that, now could I?”

**Five: Shield**

Charles is sitting up in the bed, and he’s looking out into the distance. He’s not paying attention to London’s lights.

It’s been raining all day; he’d woken up to the long low roar of the storm. Water striking the windows, sheeting and sluicing and splashing down. Washing out the world.

He should have been fascinated, and he thinks that on any other day he might have even tried to go out into the downpour, since he’s never been and he’s now more than well-equipped to deal with it. He thinks that on any other day, he would have been more than eager to learn about rain, the better to incorporate its complexities into his own virtual scenarios.

But he’s here, and he doesn’t want to think about being here.

 _So what else is new,_ Charles thinks. _Well, it’s a new body. But it is still my own mind. And I can still fall prisoner to it. I’m still, and always, my own jailer._

He’s just been through another long day of sifting through his own charts, and he’s exhausted and he feels sick.

Not even getting a new installment of Wesley’s adventures can distract him, even though he’s got the book already open, and even though Wesley’s up to his ears in an exciting car chase. Three hulking armored cars against a sleek black motorcycle. 

Wesley’s not in any of those. 

_Wesley ran desperately for the airfield. People on the move behind him - four men, he thought, because he knew where the woman had been and he knew where she was going now. He had to stop her at any and all costs, and if that meant having to get into the damn airplane, having to_ pilot _it, when he’d never been up by himself, then so be it._

_In the distance the long sleek profile of the Coeurvallis: getting closer with every ground-eating stride. The world was slowing and fracturing around Wesley. He wasn’t particularly sure he should be doing anything except shooting things when he was in this state. He wasn’t particularly sure he should even be anywhere near anything as complicated as that airplane in any state: but there were things that needed doing, and he was the instrument and the weapon, and...._

Charles has to turn the page if he wants to know what happens next.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see that the nurse who’s going over his current vitals is looking at him even as his fingers work over his pad. The same man who brought him that first nutrient bar, who made faces at what he was delivering - who now looks distinctly worried, where Charles remembers a sleepy, slightly disinterested expression.

Time flows around him and the words that were on the other pages dance in the darkness behind his closed eyes. The tests that were run on him to determine his fitness for the _dennō_ protocols and the cyberization process, once every year like clockwork beginning from when he was seven. Positive results every time, and year on year the doctors’ notations saying that he was a perfect candidate for the transcription/transfer process. That he would have been happy and healthy and free; that recovery from the childhood traumas of being bedridden would have been swift.

Charles clenches his fists in the bedding - and is suddenly torn out of his reverie when he hears something rip. 

At the same time there’s a hand wrapped around his left wrist, and he looks up and into the sleepy-eyed nurse’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Charles says. “You’ll have to replace the sheets.”

“I’m not interested in hearing you apologize,” the nurse says, and lets him go. “I’m more interested in seeing you distracted from whatever it is that’s burning you up. Anna talks to me about you sometimes. She worries about you. You are carrying far too much weight, and I’m not talking about your chassis. Don’t you have access to the world nets or something? Get out of your head for an hour. Take a break. Whatever it is that you’re thinking of is going to set back your recovery if you don’t stop.”

It’s the most that Charles has ever heard him say. The expression on the man’s face seems to match his urgent words: eyebrows drawn together in nearly a straight line, the corner of his mouth turned down, crow’s feet tightening in the corners of his eyes. 

“I - how do you know this?”

The man looks away, then - steps away from the bed and tosses his pad at the side table. He shoves his hands into his pockets. When he looks at the windows Charles gets the impression that he’s seeing something beyond the glass windows and the shadows of streaking rain. “...Personal experience.”

“Yours or another’s?” Charles asks. He knows full well he might not get an answer. It’s curiosity, and not always of a particularly wholesome strain. 

“Both,” the man says, eventually.

The overcast day begins to fade into a sullen night.

“What kind of distraction would you suggest?” Charles says.

“Music,” is the prompt reply. “Books, maybe. Whatever you want. Virtual immersion scenarios if you can access them.”

“I make my own.”

The man glances at him, and raises an eyebrow. He still looks haunted. “So much the better for you, then. Build something new, or rebuild something that never worked. Refine something, I don’t know. Either way: get lost, whether in the code or in something else. Anywhere but here. It’s not an ideal solution and I’d be the first to tell you so. But it is _a_ solution.” 

Charles murmurs “Thank you” as the man slips out the door. He climbs out of bed, taking his blankets along with him, and absently reaches for a nutrient bar as he goes to the windows. Not in the chair this time. He wraps the blanket around his shoulders and sits down cross-legged in the corner of the room. London is on his right side, and the rest of the hospital room fades into shadows on his left.

In his mind, he thinks toward the data connections left to him from the backups from his old apparatus. Something clicks, quietly, in one ear, and a virtual display appears over his view, skeleton blue lines through which he can still see the real world. Here is a window with neatly arranged folders. _CX_ to _VI_ to - he hesitates, because he’s always loved Juliet Two. Being in that scenario has always given him an odd sort of comfort. 

He looks away from _Juliet_ and tracks toward _Tango_. There is a check mark next to the scenario marked _Three_ \- Charles smiles a little, and it feels like he hasn’t smiled in a long time.

Before he can call up the Tango Four scenario, however, there’s a flash of bright golden light in the corner of the interface and Charles almost cries out in shock. He’s not quite used to the visualizations yet, and this is the first time he’s ever seen a gold alert. The few glitches he’d encountered on first activating this system were all in red, and had all been thankfully easy to deal with.

As Charles watches, the gold flash appears again. This time it’s a square at the “bottom” of the interface and when he fixes his gaze on it, the gold begins to expand until it’s seemingly floating on top of the blue lines in his vision.

A blinking golden cursor, and then it begins to move across his field of vision, leaving letters and spaces in its wake.

The cursor is the exact same shade of gold as a long strand of golden hair, woven into the wires connecting a set of headphones to a music player.

The letters and spaces are initially nothing but gibberish, and a smaller window pops up, requesting Charles’s date of birth.

An encrypted message, with himself as the key? 

He doesn’t want any part of this, but he finds himself thinking about the requested information - it takes him a moment to remember the exact year - and as soon as he completes the thought, the gibberish begins to resolve into something he can read.

_Hello, Charles. It’s been a while. I hope you’re adjusting well to your new circumstances._

“What - who - ” He thinks he sounds very small, and very lost. 

But the message doesn’t respond to him at all. It just keeps expanding. It is as if he is not there. A one-way message: intended for him, but non-interactive. 

_I managed to find you and link in to you almost as soon as you’d completed the cyberization process, but it’s been very difficult to actually contact you in real time. Not your fault. I’m not exactly in the best of situations right now. And don’t worry, I’ve got you protected. I’m tapped in to you, but the link between the two of us is active only when I can pass my own security protocols, and that...really doesn’t happen very often right now._

_They’re doing things to me. I won’t be the one who leads them to you, though. I owe you that much at least, I owe you that protection. I am good at stealing secrets and that means that I know how to keep a secret. I know how to keep_ you _a secret. You and I will just have to take that leap of faith. I won’t compromise you, and so you won’t be able to connect to me._

_You and I have met before, although unfortunately I was not using my own body and you were, in any case, out cold for the duration. I opened a back door into one of the artificial nurses at the hospital where you were treated for that unfortunate case of alcohol poisoning, and left you something to help while the days away._

Charles glances sharply around the room. The music player went up in flames together with his virtual immersion apparatus and the rest of the Xavier house. He now has access to the music files courtesy of the world nets, although he can’t remember all of the titles that had originally been on the player, when it had first come into his hands.

So now he has a...source...for it. He wonders if the message will give him a name. He desperately wants to be able to contact this person, but the beginning of the message has already left him chilled. He’s desperate for contact, and he can’t do anything about it, though there are strange instincts rising up in him. He wants to _protect_ \- but what can he do, newly embodied and completely new to the world? He might as well be a newborn.

The words of the message are rearranging themselves, shifting to occupy the left side of his field of vision. On the right side are mock-ups of his own charts and medical/legal documentation: they would go by too quickly were ordinary readers trying to follow them, but Charles has spent the past few days poring over them, and he can keep up. 

The words continue to appear: _I’m sure that by now someone will have briefed you on the fact that there were orders regarding your transcription/transfer process, and I’m sure that by now you’ve almost driven yourself crazy trying to figure out how that happened, knowing what your mother and your stepfather felt and thought about you._

_The truth is that it’s my fault that the process took so long. I would have broken you out somehow, much sooner than this, but I was delayed again and again. I really wish I hadn’t been. You could have been mobile and free for years. But I failed you, and so this will not be the first time I apologize for my ineptitude._

Again, Charles mouths, “Who are you?”

This time, the message seems to answer him.

 _I’m Raven Xavier, and I’m not really related to you by blood. My last name used to be Darkholme. My mother, Marie, was Brian Xavier’s most trusted research associate. She told me that he talked about you very often, that he missed you very much, and that he bitterly regretted not being able to come home to do anything about your condition, because he was too deeply embroiled in his work for the American Empire._

_Before he died, he requested that she and I take his name, and use that and his remaining connections and influence to get you away from the Markos. We were already well underway with that when my mother died unexpectedly herself. So, delays upon delays - and then that fire happened. Oh, god, I was so worried for you. I had to call in many favors to get you out. I hope that I have at least started to repay my debt to you by writing those orders appended to your charts. In so doing, I did at least manage to reach one of our original objectives._

_Charles, I want to be able to tell you the completed story, and I want to be able to really meet you. I have so much explaining to do. But I’m in my own complicated situation, while you still have to complete your rehab, and really go out there and_ live _. That’s what you should do – what I would tell you to do, if I had the right to give you advice._

_I won’t ask you to come and help me, not yet. I’m not really sure I deserve it right now._

_So this is all I can do for you now: I can give you something else to do when you’re finished with your recovery process - or, hell, you might actually find this useful even while you’re undergoing rehab. I’ve seeded about a couple of gigs’ worth of special learning software in your cyberbrain. The programs will allow you to use your prosthesis in every possible way it can be used: to defend yourself and to fight for your own survival, and to protect others if that becomes absolutely necessary._

_The programs include but are not limited to combat disciplines: the use of firearms, several complete canons of martial arts (both bare-handed and weapons-based types), and methods of running and dodging over and around natural and man-made obstacles. You might want to develop a sense of strategy and tactics, or a means of improvising these things, since they often come in handy in a fight._

At the end of that sentence, a file address appears - and then the cursor blinks out completely. 

“Am I to be a soldier of some kind, then?” Charles asks the dark and empty room.

The rain does not answer him.

When he closes his eyes, the message written in gold vanishes as well, leaving him with the ordinary blue-frame virtual display.

But he remembers the file address and he thinks about it before he thinks _at_ it. The interface shifts and starts flickering through the layers of data, deeper and deeper into Charles’s own augmented memory system. His thoughts fly rapidly through the indexes, and then he arrives at a set of folders bearing the prefix RDX.

“Raven Darkholme, now Raven Xavier,” Charles murmurs, and he opens the first folder. The sub-folders bear the names of various fighting forms from all throughout human history: ancient Chinese martial arts as well as more recent forms, including MCMAP from before the partitioning of the United States, and Krav Maga from the Palestinian Homelands. There is also an extended catalog of new fighting styles, including a series of forms from Fukuoka in Japan, which are explicitly designed for quick learning and instant use by both cyborg and android combatants.

For some reason, when he thinks of people who might be able to hold their own in a fight, he thinks first of the strength and of the grace in Anna’s light lithe frame. He doesn’t know why this also makes him think about the sleepy-eyed nurse, when he doesn’t even know what that man’s name is - but that is easily rectified, and Charles feels a little abashed when he looks up the hospital duty rosters, when he accesses the list of personnel assigned to his case.

Lee; the man’s name is Lee. Charles resolves to introduce himself properly, the next time Lee comes in to deliver supplies. 

_Old habits die fast,_ he thinks. There was a very, very long time when Charles was made of flesh and blood, and isolated at that, when the world was so drastically small and limited for him: four walls and a ceiling and a floor, and the walls interrupted by a door and by a set of windows. Within those limits he had been physically confined to a bed frame bolted down to a floor. 

He’d had access to some means of escape, but they were all temporary escapes. Not that this has stopped him from loving books, not that this has made him averse to going online and interacting with people, not that this has stopped him from continuing to work on virtual immersion scenarios. He’s thinking of starting something new, perhaps the first time he’s ever tried to work within the setting of a city, and he’s thinking about calling it the Hotel series.

As complex as building a city landscape might be compared to isolated beaches and lonely snowed-in backyards, he does have a model he can use; all he needs to do is look out his window, at the cold glittering lights of London and Westminster wrapped in neon and noise. It’s as good a reminder as any that there is a world outside this room and outside his hospital. And it’s as good an enticement as any to know that he’s been starting to learn how to walk around in it, thanks to Anna’s steady encouragement and the occasional bout of amused hectoring, and thanks to the anecdotes that Lee has been sharing with him: the man likes to talk about all kinds of strange food and drink from all over the world.

Raven’s words and Raven’s programs are making him think about the _other_ rest of the world: the world that exists in his mind and outside of it. A virtual infinity of data and documents and bits and pieces of uploaded consciousness from everyone and everything that can connect to it. Machines and men and women and cyborgs and androids, Charles thinks, and he’s not even looped in right now but he feels the same rush of _linking_.

He has to take a moment to calm himself after that. It’s so different from what he used to know - so different that sometimes he shies away, cringing, from it. He unthinkingly walks around his room, and only looks up when he passes his faint reflection in the windows for what turns out to be the third time.

It feels really, really good to be able to get to his feet - and there’s no real reason for him to stop, so he starts on one of Anna’s flexibility routines. He stands up straight, feet a little farther apart than shoulder-width, and he raises his right arm to the ceiling and slowly, slowly begins to bend it backwards, the rest of him following the motion in a tightly controlled manner. The wall behind him comes into view as his dark hair falls down and away from his eyes. The movement stretches what feels like every single part of his body: the muscles in his calves and thighs flex and the bones in his spinal column curve easily with the movement.

He lowers his right arm further, enough so that he can slap his right palm onto the floor, and it’s easier to support himself now that he’s on his hand and on his feet, body arched into a perfect upside-down U. He flexes his left arm to complete the stand, and he breathes carefully, trying to catch the right moment - before he kicks his feet up, coming off the floor, and the slow pleasant burn slides down from his torso to his shoulders as he balances all of his weight on his two hands.

Charles checks his alignment, shifts his weight so as to curve his back just a little, for ease of balance. He remembers to point his toes. His hands are also a little farther apart than shoulder-width, which is an error in Anna’s system, so he slides his left hand an inch closer to his right.

The longer he holds his position the wider his smile gets - but even so, gravity still affects the fluids in his prosthesis and when he swallows and something pops loudly in his ears, Charles falls gracefully out of the hand stand, catching himself neatly on the ball of one foot and the length of his forearms.

He’s breathing heavily when he goes back to his review of Raven’s programs. He pages quickly through some of the diagrams related to the Fukuoka combat forms. They’re all interesting, but it might be a little difficult to find a place where he could practice lifting and throwing cars and _tanks_.

Eventually curiosity drives Charles to check the second folder: the nested files have a different prefix code, EML, and in addition they seem to bear the names of some thoroughly complicated machines. Before he can start reading, however, he spots an additional notation in Raven’s golden ciphertext: 

_I don’t know much about firearms myself; I asked for these as a favor from a friend of mine, who seems to have made a hobby out of this stuff. His name is Erik Lehnsherr. I have no idea where he found all these lessons, because as far as I know, he’s never had any real love for the things. But then again, I’ve never actually met him out in the real world, and for all I know, this is the sort of thing he does for a hobby._

_In any case, I hope that you will find his annotations helpful. You should be of age now and there should be no reason why you should be refused a permit to carry a firearm of your own. I’m not at all fond of guns, but my friend is right, and you should take his advice, which basically boils down to this._

_It’s better to have a gun and not need it, than to need a gun and not have it._

Both Raven and her friend make good points, Charles thinks. He would never have thought about picking up a gun himself without having grave reservations about the weapon and the actions that necessitate its use, and are necessitated by its use. But he doesn’t even have to look at the news to know that he’d rather be on Erik Lehnsherr’s side of the debate. 

Whoever is writing Wesley’s adventures sometimes seems to be writing from his or her own personal experiences of war zones, because the characters aren’t exactly normal, but they still suffer the strange and banal shocks of life after the Third and Fourth World Wars. Shocks that include people dying entirely random deaths, in which the killers often get off with little more than a slap on the wrist, or, as on many occasions in the books and in the news, are even _rewarded_ for what they had done. Wesley’s not even the only character to have some kind of superhuman ability - the _dennō_ protocols and the abilities they can grant apparently don’t exist in that world, and in their place there is a wide variety of odd powers, strange means of killing and of hurting people, and all of them were apparently bestowed by genetic mutation.

That was one of the reasons why he loved the books. The other is the sheer expertise of the writer - every book has a fight of some kind, and every fight is nothing short of _brilliant_. Charles has read and reread the books, and he still remembers grinning even though his nerves were overloading from the tension of the fight scenes, were singing a high shrieking note of pain in his ears. He remembers reading on, because he didn’t want to miss a thing.

He thinks about Wesley’s preferred weapons - the black knife, of course, and a heavy-looking pistol that has been described several times as much too big for the character’s hands - and he wonders, idly, about looking up the Fukuoka combination forms for using different types of weapons at the same time.

“Or perhaps someone will tell me I’m entertaining too many bad ideas,” Charles muses, and he opens the first document in the EML folders. _Gun Safety: Cooper Manual - Read this first._

*

Anna throws Lee to the mats for the third time running.

“I can do this all day,” the sleepy-eyed nurse wheezes as he rolls over onto his back - but he stays on the mats where she’s left him, and Charles watches his chest move up and down, heaving for breath.

“I’m sure you can, Lee,” Anna says, half-mocking and half-fond, and then she casually walks over and places her bare foot very lightly over his sternum. “Stay there.” To Charles: “Do you think you’ve got it?”

“I got it the first time, I think,” Charles says, grinning. “I just thought you were having fun with him.”

“Oh, very funny, Charles, you’re a real friend,” Lee grouses, but he’s smiling and when Charles goes over to him, gets down on his knees to sit next to him and leans over so they’re almost face to face, he says, “You throw her once, we’re even.”

“I’m not sure I can,” Charles murmurs - but he gets up, and he and Anna square off and it’s almost comical when Lee scuttles quickly off the mats. And then Charles blinks and focuses on her, instead, and he thinks carefully about his own body, about this prosthesis and its weights and its sensors.

When she kicks out and punches him he’s ready: his movements are small, precise, and economical. He redirects the force of her strikes and uses her momentum against her. He may be a novice when it comes to the actual physical movements, but he’s run these types of skirmishes over and over in his head in the weeks since he downloaded and practically inhaled the special programs. 

This may be the first time he’s really grateful to be in this condition: the virtual skirmishes don’t make him hurt like actual practice does but they are just as effective to him, as his brain recalibrates on the fly, responding to his environment and to the stimuli affecting him. 

As soon as Anna makes the mistake of stepping in closer to him he seizes her wrist and ducks and weaves and the next thing he knows is that she’s in the air, that her feet are off the ground. She falls in a neat heap on the mats, though she still grunts a little on impact.

“I’m sorry,” Charles says, even as he spins back around to look at her, even as he stays in a combat-ready position, fists held up to punch or block or grab.

“Don’t be,” Anna and Lee say at the same time.

He’s immediately backing up because he needs the space, he needs to react, because the two of them are bearing down on him. His mind churns through the possible methods for countering two or more opponents at the same time: there’s X and Y and Z and there’s the possibility of combining the approaches, but he has to finish the thought and act, now, because Anna is within grappling range and Lee is going for his feet, and in the end Charles resorts to his backflip trick, bracing his entire body weight for a moment on one hand and lashing out at them with his other hand and with both feet. 

He hears the loud strikes in the room, and he manages to throw himself back upright and then down on his hands again. He kicks out, low to the mats, and Lee goes down and stays down, leaving Anna - and Charles simply aims a punch right into her face, which she blocks with a bare inch to spare. Charles is very nearly touching her nose with his knuckles.

“I don’t think there’s anything you can teach him, Anna,” Lee says.

“I had nothing left to teach him at the beginning of this week,” Anna says, and she smiles, and steps out of Charles’s space, and she offers him a brief bow and a familiar salute: right fist cupped in left palm. “This is just practical application, or perhaps it is just a way of making sure that what resides in his mind is also now in his body, in his very skin and nerves and muscles.”

“I’m right here,” Charles says, and he plucks the nutrient bar that Lee throws in his direction out of the air, a clean snatch without even looking at it.

“Yes, we mean to be overheard,” Anna says, and she laughs quietly, even as she gestures impatiently for the sandwich in Lee’s hand. “Gimme. Hungry.”

“I find it absolutely charming that you’re so eloquent when you’re exhausted,” Lee says, rolling his eyes, but he sits down on her other side and nudges her shoulder with his, and they smile at each other. 

Charles keeps his eyes respectfully averted, even as he says, “Is there anything else I ought to do in order to get better?”

There is a tense, interested silence, and then: “Why do you want to get better?” Lee asks.

Charles goes still for a moment. He remembers the amused look in Anna’s eyes when he’d told her about Raven’s and Erik’s software; he remembers the frankly skeptical expression in Lee’s. It had been difficult enough to talk to the two of them about skipping rehab and getting used to his new body, about being able to _use_ it in combat. They have both outright refused to let him have access to any kinds of firearms.

How is he going to start explaining about the origin of this body, about his own self-imposed debts? How is he going to start explaining about Raven, about the fact that she must be in some kind of trouble or she would have been here by now - and those are even her own words? How is he going to explain himself without sounding like a child who has just discovered that he can run and now wants to know if he can fly?

“Don’t,” Anna suddenly says.

When Charles looks up, though, she’s looking at Lee and not at him, a strange hard light in her eyes. “Don’t ask him these kinds of questions. Not now. Maybe in the future, when he actually has answers.” She transfers that grave regard to him. “Unless you do have answers and you’re just having a hard time putting them together with the right questions.”

“I don’t have much of either, to tell the truth,” Charles says. He finishes his meal for lack of anything else to do. “How shall I put it? In all those years of being ill, of being left alone, I wished for something with everything I had in me. As time passed I lost hope, and I lost sight of that wish. That wish has come true at last, but now I am finding out that I may have to pay a price for having been granted it.”

“Fair enough,” she says, then nudges Lee. “Tell him.”

Charles blinks. “Tell me what?”

Lee makes a face, but not for long - he sighs, and smiles at her. But when he turns to Charles there is neither sleepiness nor laughter in his eyes. “I don’t normally tell people where I’ve been.”

“And I don’t think it’s anybody’s business to ask,” Charles says kindly. “So you do what you can to make sure that people don’t normally look at you, or only look at you for as long as they have to, and no longer. You hide. You protect yourself. I know, and I understand. Please don’t tell me any more than you have to. You have a right to keep your secrets.” 

Anna cracks a slight smile. “Thank you for telling him all that so I don’t have to.”

Lee rolls his eyes, and then shrugs and puts his hand on Charles’s shoulder: a large warm weight. “All right, Charles, I give. So there are exceptions to that rule. Anna is one. You are about to become the other.”

Charles almost wants to make a joke, but Lee’s shoulders slump forward suddenly as though he is carrying a great weight, and that is more effective than a request for silence. 

“All right. I wasn’t always a nurse,” Lee says. “I used to be the exact opposite of a nurse.”

“You were not,” Anna interjects. 

Charles watches him shrug her words away. “Not helping. Because even if I didn’t kill anyone, I still wasn’t doing anything good. I didn’t step aside when others did the killing, and I didn’t stop them from getting on with the killing. So I was either doing wrong myself or a party to wrongdoing; they’re much the same in my books. Voluntary and involuntary did not really come into it. All that came to an end somehow, someway; I’m not going to tell you that. 

“The point is that I was taken out. I was _forced_ to stop. There was a person who stopped me and performed something she called cognitive recalibration: which basically means she kicked the shit out of me. And she then told me to make something else of myself.” 

Lee takes a deep breath, and looks Charles directly in the eye. 

“She stopped me right in my tracks and there are very few ways of doing that, especially to the person I used to be. She used the direct approach: she hacked straight into my head, into my cyberbrain. And mine’s been messed around with enough times that what she did should have killed her or hurt her or something. Nothing of the sort happened. She just blew past the failsafes and traps in my head like they were nothing. Let’s just say, she’s that good. She always has been.

“But such was the nature of what I was doing that she couldn’t hack into me without letting me see who she was, in turn. I learned her real name. Bits and pieces of her life.

“I think she can help you, Charles, because I think she knows about what you’ve been through - and whatever it is you’re talking about when you’re talking about prices to pay, she maybe might have the answers. It’s in the nature of her job, you know. She has to know things, and she has to act on the things that she knows, because there are lives depending on her to know and to act.”

Charles leans forward. “Who is this person you’re talking about?”

“Look it up, Charles.” Anna sounds grave and gentle, and she sounds like she’s wishing him luck. “Look them up. They’re called Public Security Section 9 of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Special bureau of the Japanese government.”

“And you need to look up their squad leader. Major Motoko Kusanagi. If you manage to find her, if she’s still around, tell her I sent you,” Lee says. “Tell her she kicked me in the head so hard I was seeing stars for eighteen point five seconds. That should be enough to identify me.”

Charles is still on the mats of the practice room long after Anna and Lee have left. Pages and pages of mission reports and news articles flash up behind his closed eyelids. Most of the documents are in Japanese, and about half of them are really nothing more than a tissue of official facts over wild speculation. A woman leading a squad of AI-enhanced spider tanks into battle. The same woman hacking into one of her own men to save his life. 

Charles wonders about hacking, and his mind wanders to Raven and to this Major Kusanagi, and by the time he gets to his feet and makes his way back to his room, he thinks he’s made a decision.

He’s not entirely sure about that decision, as he’s not entirely sure about venturing out into the world so soon after the traumas of his life. He thinks he may never really recover from the years of being flat on his back, from the memories of the fire - but here he is, alive and mobile, and if nothing else, he owes help to those who’ve helped him.

If nothing else, he owes Raven his life. And he might believe that his life is small against the weight of the world on her shoulders, but it’s his life, and thanks to her he can choose what to do with it, and this is what he’s going to do with it.

**Six: Student**

The brisk winds of Fukuoka hit him almost like a slap to the face: fresh and cold and constant, enough that when Charles looks back over his shoulder at the entrance to the terminal he can see how the breeze is playing havoc with his hair. Even if he’s just a shadow in the glass walls, he can see how the strands are all waving and whipping around his head.

He pulls up a virtual display in the corner of his left eye. There are two clocks there now: one set to UTC±00:00, and one set to UTC+09:00. 

On the surface of it, Fukuoka at night looks entirely like London at night: the same scatter-plot of streetlights and garish neon, the same stars and planets whirling higher than aircraft and satellites. The languages he’s hearing here are the same as the languages he’d listened attentively to during the trip, the same languages he’d listened to while walking the London sidewalks, in the last few weeks before his departure: a strange disjointed song of fragmented words and emotional notes, voices rising and falling.

Fukuoka even feels like London did, for the most part: he can smell the fumes from jet fuel and the exhaust from cars pulling up at the kerb or slashing past him at speed, headed to places he knows nothing about. There are beeps and snatches of electronic melody all around him, and the faces of the men and women walking past him are often illuminated from without by the glow of their handheld computers, or illuminated from within by active data connections or other processes running in their cyberbrains.

Try as Charles might to find comfort in the similarities between the two cities on opposite sides of the planet, that’s exactly the reason for the strange itch in his fingertips: apprehension, he thinks, because he was confined to a small space for so many years and now he’s just proven to himself that he can travel the world.

The wind shifts and suddenly cuts through his layers of jacket and shirts, and with each breath he thinks he smells distant snow. In the real world Charles looks over his shoulder at the bulk of the terminal; in the virtual world, he is looking at a map of the city, hemmed in on three sides by mountains and then contained by the sea to the north. As confined as he once was, he thinks, even though Fukuoka continues to grow, expanding out into the Sea of Genkai. His virtual map highlights the many stretches and islands of reclaimed land, like a fleet standing guard over the seaside approach to the city.

Someone pushes past him, and that’s enough to jar him out of his reverie. He has to hurry; it’s now getting on to nine in the evening local time, and he has to get to the hostel before it closes at midnight. He pulls up Anna’s directions, then shoulders his duffel bag; the internal map flashes the characters for _subway_ , and he turns to follow a group of sleepy young travelers to the station.

“Charles Xavier,” someone says.

Charles stops in his tracks, and turns around. The small crowd thins out and moves on, leaving him behind with a tall, burly man with a white ponytail, the end of which is being flipped in and out of sight behind one massive shoulder by the constant wind.

“Hello,” Charles says. He keeps his hands in his pockets. 

He knows no one in this country. He only has a couple of names to go on, and only one of those names belongs to a person, and this person is not the Major, not by any stretch of the imagination.

“Can I help you,” Charles says.

“I was told you might be looking for help,” the man drawls, and steps closer, into a patch of flickering light shed by a nearby street lamp.

Charles shrugs. He’s a little uncomfortable. If this man should turn out to be an enemy - the problem is that even if he could get the drop on this man, he’s not going to be walking away from that fight. He’s going to have to stay here and be in the conversation, whether he likes it or not.

The man is even bigger in the light than he was in the shadows. Cybernetic, expressionless eyes in an impassive, craggy face. Fitted fleece jacket, two layers of shirts beneath. Muscular arms ending in huge fists. Fingerless leather gloves. He’s armed; his jacket doesn’t do much to conceal the large holstered pistol riding his hip, and with his bulk, Charles thinks the man could easily be carrying another weapon on his person. He has an official air about him. 

“You’re a friend of Lee’s - and Anna’s,” the stranger says.

Charles feels his eyes widen a little. “I was their patient, yes,” he says, after a long pause. “And they’ve both honored me by calling me their friend. I think I owe them part of my life.”

“We all owe parts of our lives to other people; I know I owe mine to people _and_ to some things that aren’t really people but I think they are, and my opinion is the only one that counts.”

“Okay,” Charles says. “So you know my friends.”

“And I know the person you’re looking for. I’m Batou. Public Security Section 9. The Major is - well, she’s my boss, if we’re out in the field.”

“I _am_ looking for Major Kusanagi, but I wasn’t exactly thinking that she would be looking for me in her own turn.” Charles wraps his arms around himself in a futile attempt to stave off his shivers. “Who am I? Insignificant and a foreigner, which makes me doubly insignificant. In fact, I thought I’d have to get on some kind of list to be allowed to even enter the building that your team operates from.” He shrugs self-deprecatingly. “I thought I’d have to wade through bureaucracy to get an appointment with her - and I’ve had to learn something about bureaucracy in the past month or so; London’s was bad, and I was told to expect that Fukuoka’s can only be much, _much_ worse.”

Batou smirks. “Bureaucracy here’s about as easy as loading a shotgun shell into a Mateba revolver. But if you know your way around, it can be a little easier to get what you want.”

Charles rolls his eyes. “I don’t know anything about that,” he sighs. “I was just explaining, wasn’t I? I just got here. I can’t pass for local. I can just barely read the language and I definitely don’t speak it. I don’t know where you and your people are. I’m here because my life has turned into a wild-goose chase, and I wasn’t even able to _stand_ for most of it, so maybe you can imagine how disoriented I am right now.”

“It’s about to get worse,” Batou says, and a huge grin spreads across his face. “Because you’re about to meet the Major. I’m to take you straight to her.”

 _“What,”_ Charles says. 

Whatever else he has to say is drowned out by the sudden roar of an engine from somewhere very close by. 

Batou chuckles to himself as a sleek yellow sports coupe, clearly under his control, rolls up to the kerb. It soon goes into idle, but it’s still roaring under the hood.

Charles is spared from having to ask the obvious question when Batou shouts, “You damage this and I kill you,” and then he motions Charles over to the passenger side.

That gives him just enough time to look the car up: it’s a Lancia Stratos HF. “What is someone like you doing with a car like this?” Charles asks, incredulous, as Batou grabs the steering wheel and revs up the engine, louder than before. “Shouldn’t she be in a museum somewhere? Did you _liberate_ her from a garage or exhibit or something?”

Batou just grins, and grins some more, and he is silent for the rest of the drive.

From the airport the drive into Fukuoka city proper takes only a few minutes - but Batou abruptly peels off the highway and he plunges down a maze-like series of narrow streets, screeching around several tight corners before pulling up in front of what used to be a compact commercial building. The front doors and windows are boarded up and covered over with graffiti in several languages.

Charles follows him down the alley and then into a door tucked away into the side of the building. He only has enough time to wince over his bedraggled state - a black leather jacket over drab gray clothes, mud-splattered workboots, none of it fitting him exactly - before Batou pulls him upstairs, past a series of closed doors, and then to the end of the corridor and the only lit room in the place.

“Lit” is a relative term, however. Most of the illumination comes from a series of large monitors hanging on the walls, as well as from the large table dominating the center of the room, into the surface of which is embedded an oversized flatscreen. Charles looks around at the displays and he thinks that they might be maps or they might be neural diagrams; there’s no way of knowing without asking, and the woman standing over the table with eyes closed and arms crossed over her chest doesn’t look like she’s taking questions.

He doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be doing in here. The woman only vaguely resembles the image of the Major that Lee had found for him: black form-fitting outfit, a pistol in a shoulder holster, bare feet.

“You awake in there,” Batou asks, conversationally, as he drops into the only chair in the room. It creaks ominously beneath him for several seconds. “Brought you a stray.”

The woman shifts on her feet and barely makes a sound with the movement. “Mmm. He is that, among other things. But first things first. Did Togusa check in?”

“The old man is safe, if that’s what you’re asking. So’s Aramaki. We don’t have a lot of quiet nights like this.”

“Be nice, Batou.”

“Aren’t I always, Major?” Batou asks.

The woman blinks, and turns to look at Batou, and the expression is half a glare and half something almost fond, and Charles very nearly expects her to hit him.

After a moment she does walk over to the man in the chair, and she does hit him, but it’s just a light smack of her hand on his shoulder.

Lost at sea as Charles is now, he’s still able to look away. He can’t help but think he’s intruding on a rather private moment. He casts about for a distraction - wonders if it would be rude to go back into the code for one of the Hotel-series simulations - but in the end he settles on Wesley’s current adventure. He’d started the book on the plane. Wesley is currently trying to stitch up his punctured right hand - punctured _again_ , this must make the fifth or sixth time, how unlucky can a main character get? Charles flips back to the beginning of the scene. The pages float in his virtual display. He can feel his eyes moving as he reads.

It should feel strange that he’s moving his eyes when the rest of him is utterly still, but it’s something he’s been doing all his life. 

_...Wesley tossed the needle away; it missed the dish full of red-tinted alcohol, and there was a quiet_ ping _as it bounced against the metal box full of bandages before coming to a stop. He gritted his teeth and pulled the last knot tight, hissing at the pain streaking down his oversensitive/overstimulated nerves. The adrenaline rush took a long time to wear off, especially now, when he was fresh off a kill and had just performed an impromptu surgery on himself. He was surprised that he was still sitting; surprised that his own movements hadn’t sent him straight into overdrive._

_The wounds and the stitching certainly hurt enough, bled enough, to leave him dizzy and light-headed, to leave his heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his fingertips and his toes._

_Blood streaked the tiny table and left short red lines in the ruined sleeves of his shirt, in the grubby gray-white of the sheets. It was going to be hell sterilizing this place - but he was going to do it or die trying, because that had been the only good lesson he’d picked up from Fox or whatever her real name was: leave nothing behind. Not a trace, not a hair, not a drop of blood. Know how to disappear. The only thing she’d lived long enough to tell him, really._

_And it said a lot about who and what Wesley was now, that this was very wrong advice and it was still the only thing that made complete and absolute sense to him._

_He had to force himself to calm down, and when he did, he reached for the matches -_

Someone has taken his wrist and is speaking quietly to him. 

_I thought that part was very well-written. It rings true, at least, even though things are considerably easier for me and mine if we should get injured. Relatively speaking. And I’m surprised, because no one told me I’d be speaking to someone else who likes those books._

_They’re not for everyone, I know,_ Charles says, unthinkingly, and he bookmarks the page where Wesley starts shredding the remaining bedding. Out loud, he adds, “I like Wesley, though. He’s rude, and he never thinks his decisions through, but somehow it makes sense for him to survive.”

“He uses too many bullets, though.”

He can’t help but smile, because he agrees. “I think he’s too busy to think about wasting bullets; he has too many enemies to fight off. It has to be the last thing on his mind. Besides, he should get a break sometimes; he gets beaten down enough, and not just by the aforementioned too many enemies.”

The woman laughs softly. “Perhaps you’re right about all of that. And I agree with you about Wesley deserving a break. Although perhaps he should see someone for his traumas, first.”

And then realization strikes Charles right between the eyes: the book is inside his head and has been there all along. He’s been reading it behind his own eyes. 

Maybe the woman has a copy of the book, as well, but since they hadn’t even exchanged two words yet, how could she synchronize her file to his so exactly? The only logical conclusion is that the woman has just been reading it right along with him, that she was reading the same scene he was, and commenting on it. 

That the woman was in there with him somehow, in his head with him.

He remembers her amused words filtering into his mind - and not coming in through his ears; he remembers her quiet voice directly inside his cyberbrain.

Charles very carefully dismisses the book and his virtual displays. He wishes it was as easy to bring back the calm that he’d felt for a moment while reading about Wesley. Impossible to feel it right now, although he does his best: he squares his shoulders and looks up at the woman who is still standing next to him, who is right in his personal space although she has let go of his wrist.

She is smiling at him, polite and assessing at the same time. 

Charles is looking her right in her odd red-purple eyes when she speaks - and again she’s inside his head. He fights past his shock to listen to her words. 

_Hello. You’re Charles Xavier, aren’t you?_

“Yes, I am.”

Something moves in the corner of his peripheral vision and he looks sharply over at Batou, whose shoulders are shaking in silent laughter.

“Stop that,” the woman says. “Or you get scut work for the next three cases and I will make it so you cannot swap with Ishikawa or _anyone_ at all, you lazy bastard. And you know I’ll know if you cheat.”

That shuts Batou up, and Charles cannot help himself - he sticks his tongue out at him.

“Classy,” the woman says to Charles, out loud this time. “But feel free to keep doing that. I’m giving you blanket permission. Mock him all you want. You should listen to the Tachikoma go after him.”

“I’ve read a little about Tachikoma,” Charles says. And then he screws up all his courage, and extends a hand to her. “It’s an honor to meet you - you’re the Major, right?”

“Kusanagi Motoko,” she says. Her hand is shapely like Anna’s was, though rough around the fingertips; large and unexpectedly heavy. There are black streaks on her wrist and her forearm.

Charles has about a million questions whirling around in his head, but the first one he blurts out as soon as they step apart is this: “How can you be looking for me? I wasn’t even actually alive for a long time. I was as good as _dead_ a few months ago. How can you know who I am? What use can you have for someone like me? And: what did you just _do_ to me? Am I compromised?”

She holds up her other hand to him, palm out.

Charles watches her turn to look at Batou, then turns to look himself as Batou walks out the door and closes it.

If Charles squints, he can still see the hulking outline of the man, standing guard over the room and over the people in it. 

It makes him think of loyalty. He knows the word in the abstract, and he thinks he might have seen a concrete example of it in Lee and Anna - in the way they moved together, in the way they seemed to finish each other’s thoughts if not each other’s sentences. He wonders if loyalty can have anything to do with his own decision to seek out the woman who is now standing before him.

But how can he have any loyalty to someone he’s never even met before? Is that even possible?

The Major pushes the chair toward him. “Sit down. I’m sure you have questions. I might have some answers. You’d better get comfortable.” 

Charles watches her follow her own advice as she hops lightly up onto the surface of the table. Her fingers dance over the nearest corner, and the screen obligingly goes blank, but not dark, so they still have some light to see each other by. 

He takes the chair and turns it front to back before sitting in it. 

“Good,” Kusanagi says. “First things first. Obtaining a visa to come to Japan is a little like making a promise in advance. You make a promise to abide by the laws governing the nation, for as long as you are here.”

“Yes, and you are part of the law,” Charles says. “The name of your group says pretty much everything, but it does raise questions, such as: _nine_ sections?”

“Each Public Security Section has its own mandate, and ours is cyber-terrorism. We are digital soldiers; we protect the cyber-territory of this country, and the cyber-rights of its citizens.” She waves a hand around at the cables and the screens. “You can imagine we are kept pretty busy most of the time. But let me skip those answers, since you can have them at another time. I can give you a file address and a password so you can study the briefing materials we’ve prepared. Instead, let me answer that obvious question and the ones you asked me a few minutes ago. What did Lee tell you, when he said that you should come to me?” 

“Eighteen point five seconds,” Charles says. 

“Yes, I remember that rather vividly,” she says, looking amused. “What else?”

“That you know about what I’ve been through, and that you know something about paying the price for a life-changing gift.” Charles closes his eyes. “Were you ill, too?”

“Very,” Kusanagi says. “I was born with it, and it was killing me almost from the womb. I was taking in a battery of medicines together with my mother’s milk. But there, too, what happened to me is vastly different from what happened to you. I had family in the first place, who made a decision when my life was at risk. I’ve read your medical files, Charles Xavier, and I know that you very nearly didn’t have anyone to do the same for you. I am about to tell you something that might as well be useless, but allow me to say the words.” 

There is a brief silence, in which Charles can hear only the faint humming of electricity and electronics. 

“I am sorry for what happened to you,” Kusanagi says.

“It happened,” Charles says after a while. It hurts, in the philosophical sense, to shrug. At last, however, he opens his eyes and looks at her, accepting her words. “It happened, and it was a catalyst. One that led me here to you.”

“Quite. So, answers.” She taps her fingers once again on the surface of the table. “You’re not compromised, by the way. I did hack into you, but it was only so that I could be sure of your identity, so that I could know that you were who you said you were.”

“Do you do that to everyone you meet?”

Kusanagi smiles, suddenly - a sharp brief sliver, there and gone again. “Only to people who are important. You’ll have to ask my team. I’ve done it to all of them, one way or another.”

“Even Batou?”

She chuckles. “ _Especially_ Batou. And with him I don’t have to be kind or gentle.”

Charles whistles, or tries to, and settles for saying “Wow.” 

“I found something else in there,” she says. “Are you aware that there is a partition of your cyberbrain that is protected by a particularly robust firewall?”

“Yes,” he replies immediately. “Although I did not quite think of it in those terms. As I did with my own original brain, I think of this cyber-version as a network that has all kinds of useful nodes, plus the numerous links between those nodes. For me, it’s my own private network, sprawling out whether I’m logged on to the world networks or not. That there is a section of my network that is blocked off from _myself_ \- I don’t know how to tell you why I’m not bothered by it.”

“I can guess. You know who programmed your cyberbrain, who loaded your software into it. You also know that that person’s signature is all over the firewall.”

“And I trust that person whether that trust is justified or not. Which means that I’m concerned about her firewalling me, but I’m not worried. Not yet, not until there’s a reason to be so. We’re going to start talking about Raven, then,” Charles says. “Do you know her, too?”

She nods after a moment. “We know about her, and we know that she’s here.”

“You have her exact coordinates? Is she okay? Is she safe?”

“No, probably, and I don’t know. She’s in Fukuoka Prefecture at the very least, and the little data we have seem to indicate that she’s somewhere in the city itself, or someplace very close by. But we haven’t been able to get into any more detail. She’s being protected - or perhaps I should say she’s being hidden.”

Charles barks out a brief, short, angry laugh. “That’s reassuring, especially coming from _you_. As I’m given to understand it, you have _jurisdiction_ over these kinds of matters.”

He watches her eyebrow shift upwards. “We do have the authority. But we’re not gods, and hers is not the only case we’re dealing with. Searching takes time. And here in Fukuoka, the local networks alone are so vast to be as close to infinite as makes nearly no difference.”

“If I offered my help, as little as it is, will you accept it?”

“I would,” she replies promptly. “But you have to know what you’d be getting yourself into, if you join Section 9 in any capacity. I believe I mentioned the word _soldier_ earlier. Here in the very heart and hub of this city, of this country, we live in wartime. And we are not just fighting any war.” She stops, and _looks_ at him.

Charles catches his breath and fights to keep looking her in the eyes. She looks at him as piercingly as she did at the start of this conversation. There’s more than just assessment in those suddenly hard eyes.

She reminds him, very suddenly, of Anna - of the look in her eyes when Charles showed them his travel papers and his one-way ticket to Japan. The same steel even when she had been at her most encouraging; the same strength even when she had been telling him to think past the pain.

Possibilities and probabilities whirl in Charles’s head. Every day he spends training with Kusanagi and her people will be a day away from the search for Raven. It will _hurt_ to know that she is so near and yet cannot be found, and he will have to use that pain somehow; he’s already used to pain, but this is going to be different, and this is going to take a toll on him.

What he finds frightening is that he doesn’t know what that toll will be.

But he already knows he’s made his decision - he made it when he looked at Kusanagi instead of running away after she hacked into him.

So Charles gets to his feet, stands up straight, and holds out his hand again. And _again_ , how strange is it that he can do these things? “I suppose I will have to give up my old citizenships?”

“If you want,” is Kusanagi’s easy reply. “Or we can just fudge those records for you. It is an old trick we keep up our sleeves. You wouldn’t be the only one we’ve had to do this for.”

“I appreciate the offer, but - please don’t,” Charles says. “I’m aware that a lot of the work you do is rather more legally gray than black or white. But at least let me do something in the usual manner, before I start doing more unusual things.”

That gets him another sliver-smile. “Do what you want; I’ll have Togusa speak with you when he arrives in the morning. I suppose you are as ready as anyone will ever be to be thoroughly vetted, since you have declared yourself to be a blank slate. That vetting is going to take some time, but for now, let me say - welcome to Kōan Kyūka, Charles Xavier. Are you ready for this? To be part of Section 9?”

“Yes. Thank you, Major Kusanagi. I hope I am ready. I hope I pass muster.”

*

The rifle is heavy and ugly and completely foreign to Charles’s hands - but he has to give Batou the right of it. 

The thing can _shoot_.

Charles keeps his elbows tucked in and the stock right against his shoulder, and expends the last magazine into the target.

There is a certain rhythm to the firing and to the recoil and to the distant _thud_ of bullets ramming into the wall and to the _plink plink plink_ of spent cartridges falling around his feet, on the cold cement floor of the bunker that Section 9 uses for a firearms range. It’s like falling into the trance of a stretching routine: you breathe and you move - though the movement here is restricted to just his finger on the trigger - and you carry yourself with a certain steady tension. That tension manifests as an itchy kind of strange thrum between Charles’s shoulder blades. For him, it’s the opposite of a distraction: it’s a means of focusing.

When Charles fires again and the rifle simply clacks loudly at him, he almost falls out of his rigid posture with relief. At the same time he keeps to the rules of gun discipline that Batou had spent about an hour drilling into him, and which he already knew in his head thanks to Erik, Raven’s friend: he handles the gun carefully. Eject the magazine. Engage the safety. Point the muzzle downrange. Finger off the trigger at all times - until he puts the gun down and puts his hands behind his back.

Batou nods and hits a switch on the wall of the booth. The paper target moves toward them. “Better,” he says, and points at the center. Charles’s initial targets had shown torn-out x-rings, wide clusters of shots like tangential circles overlapping into the missing center of the target, touching even the outer rings. Now there is only a neat hole right in the very bull’s-eye. It is still ragged around the edges, but that is what happens when multiple large-caliber bullets tear through paper at terminal velocity, so Charles is not really concerned. “You’ve got the rest of it. Now you have to think about precision.”

“And about making a shot in the worst possible conditions,” Charles says, rolling his eyes with all the rudeness he can muster. But then again, Batou makes fun of everyone and everything; Charles is just following his example.

“Nice thing about going full-cyborg,” is the reply. “If we ever ask you to play sniper for any of us, we can leave you in the sun or in the rain or in the snow or on the damn seashore, or hell, all of those at once, and you’re going to be able to make the shot anyway. Or at least I hope you do. Same goes for you _surviving_.”

“If you ever put me in that situation, I will bring an entire magazine of proper bullets along, and take out the target as I have been ordered to do. And then I will find you, and _I will shoot you in the head_.”

“Promises, promises,” Batou says. When he laughs, the sound of it echoes again and again in the bunker.

Charles smiles and shakes his head and puts his hands in his pockets.

After a short break for a nutrient bar Charles is back in the booth. At the Major’s insistence, he’s picked a gun based on an old tactical-type pistol: it’s easy to conceal, easy to modify, easy to care for, and after all that, extremely reliable. 

He’s not a fan of guns, and he’s not a fan of what a gun can do to a person, cyborg body or no cyborg body. But his fingers wrap around the grip easily, comfortably, and the gun is now a nearly negligible weight in his hands after the great bulk of the rifle. 

Maybe it does get easier to use weapons, given time enough, and reason enough.

He thinks of Raven as he fires in a rapid but steady rhythm. He thinks of Erik, too, and he thinks of the software in his head: an effective means of introduction and familiarization. Because he already understands the theory behind the gun, because he already knows the make of the gun, he has an advantage when it’s live in his hands - live and full of bullets.

His hands do not shake, since they’re wrapped securely around the grip. He fires shot after shot into a fresh target, pausing only to reload. He gets through three magazines, his daily practice quota, and then just as he fires off the last shot something is flying at him and he moves quickly, putting the gun in safe mode and down on the ledge in the booth before moving to catch the projectile.

It’s another full magazine.

He almost expects Batou to have thrown it - but there’s another man in the bunker now. Togusa is still in a follow-through stance, and as Charles watches he shifts on his feet and brushes imaginary dust off his lapels. “I really should stop doing that to you; one day, you’re going to wind up smashing the damn thing back at me and I will wake up concussed or worse. Hello, Charles.”

“Hello, Togusa,” Charles says. “Am I running late?”

Togusa shakes his head. “No. It’s just that I’m taking you to meet her somewhere else. No need to rush. She’s still going to be doing the catching up this time.”

“All right.” 

He switches from one firing stance to another, turning sideways and extending his right arm fully to address the other end of the bunker. The gun is heavier when he only has one hand to do the carrying and shooting with. 

The final target comes back with the center completely gone: the same condition as the others had returned in.

“My professional opinion is, if you’re in a position when you have to shoot one-handed, you’re already halfway to losing,” Togusa says as Charles breaks down his pistol for a quick but thorough cleaning.

“Yes, and who had to fire four bullets of his six, one-handed, and _then_ wished for another handful the last time we were on a case?” Batou asks around his mug. 

Charles still has no idea what Batou drinks; he’s not keen on the tasteless, burned-tasting coffee that everyone in the section seems to drink in place of water, and whatever is in that mug looks worse. 

“Shut up. I still only need six bullets. Am I not allowed to be paranoid the way Saito is?” Togusa throws an empty paper cup at him. Batou shrugs, and makes no move to dodge.

“I really don’t want to know how you come by your skills at throwing things,” Charles says, lightly, and after a moment he retrieves that paper cup and fills it with water. It tastes slightly metallic and slightly salty. He makes a face after he finishes it.

“My daughter is thinking about trying out for her school’s softball team,” Togusa says. “I think I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve pitched that damn ball to her. An hour every evening after dinner; then two hours each in the morning and in the afternoon, every time I have the day off.”

“...Oh, she’s a batter,” Charles says. “Does she connect?”

“Half the time,” is the smiling response. “Not bad for someone completely natural.”

“Better put her in for target practice here, then,” Batou jokes. 

Togusa rolls his eyes so hard Charles can almost hear it.

This time, the drive to the Major’s location takes them into the heart of New Port City. It’s a long drive, and Charles spends it alternating between looking out at Fukuoka’s jagged coastline and Togusa’s hands steady on the steering wheel. There are bandages peeking out of the sleeve of his suit jacket, and if Charles adjusts his vision slightly, he can see the fresh streaks of blood on the white gauze.

He remembers tying another set of bandages in place because he remembers jumping into the chase, right on Batou’s heels; remembers the chase, and Ishikawa bellowing directions at them over the Section 9 silent comms. He remembers the heavy smell of cordite in the air after the Major and Saito, hidden on safe rooftops as their spotters and snipers, had blown the three would-be hackers’ heads clean away. He remembers Togusa clutching his right hand, and the bloody knife that Batou had kicked away from one of the bodies.

“What’s it like for you?” he asks, after a moment, hesitant and curious at the same time. “Aren’t you concerned about getting injured?”

Togusa chuckles and shakes his head, and does not seem offended. “I was wondering when you were going to ask me that question. It seems that it’s some kind of necessary rite of passage into Section 9 - Batou gets asked about going full-cyborg, or he starts talking about it; and I get asked about being a natural. The answer is yes, but no: because yes, dangerous work, but tell me, what do you think law enforcement officers were doing _before_ anyone thought of the _dennō_ protocols?”

“Running and fighting and dying in the line of duty,” Charles says.

“Yes, well, so what am I doing?” Togusa changes lanes, weaves expertly past a slow-moving truck. “I admit I’ve given some serious thought to the full conversion; my wife, in particular, has been a little more worried about me these days. Not without reason, of course. Either that or the Major’s after me to change my revolver for something with more firepower in it. But she also knows I can shoot practically anyone off her back if she should need me to, and everyone in the section knows I can keep up with them - certainly not easy given the likes of Batou, but if I’m careful, it’s doable. So I’ll keep thinking about it, but it’s not important for now.”

“You shouldn’t have to wait until something terrible happens to you, though,” Charles thinks, and for a long moment the stench of burning stone and wood and wool lingers in his head, in his nostrils.

Togusa looks at him out of the corner of his eye, a long thoughtful glance. “Noted.”

They turn another series of corners and speed past a toll gate; and then, suddenly, Charles blinks at the blaze of lights and at the buzz of conversation, which he can hear clearly even through the closed windows. “You could silence a gunshot in this racket,” he says as Togusa parks the car near a dense concentration of people and neon and exhaust smoke.

“People have tried,” Togusa says, wearily. “Good thing we’re not the ones handling the law enforcement on these streets. That’s someone else’s job - and good luck to them.”

“Hell of a job,” Charles mutters.

“Pretty much,” Togusa agrees. “You might be able to guess that I’m glad I don’t have to do it any more. Well, unless it’s orders from on high, because in that case the problem was ours to begin with. Come on.” 

Charles follows him down a warren of busy streets, and they weave and dodge around the masses of people walking on the sidewalk and on the street itself. When they round a corner and slip through a roadblock, there are no more cars; everyone is on foot and every few feet or so they thread past an idling motorcycle or a person walking their bicycle through the thick crowds.

The same itch starts up again in Charles’s skin, even as he’s looking at the faces he passes by; even as he stares at every woman with long golden hair. True, he gets thrown off by the glare of the lights; and true, he’s been into the little data Section 9 has on the whereabouts of a woman named Raven Xavier. There is nothing in those notes that could point to the possibility of her being out here on these streets.

It doesn’t stop him from looking and hoping.

“Here,” Togusa says, after a few more moments of power-walking through the crush. 

Charles watches him lift a red curtain clearly marked with the characters for - “You’re not actually going to take a bath?” he asks, quietly. He considers switching to the silent comms. “Or is she - ?”

Togusa shrugs extravagantly, not giving anything away, and heads down the corridor.

Charles very nearly curses at all the secrecy before he takes a deep breath and plunges after the other man, down a set of dark stairs, through a basement below street level where his shadow is rainbow-illuminated by the neon lights outside, and finally through a door with a palm-scanner on the jamb. 

No windows, just a handful of low lights in the corners and here and there on the bare floor. The cables spidering up the walls and ceiling feel familiar. They hum quietly, almost pleasantly, and the sound rather forcefully reminds Charles of his virtual immersion system. 

He looks around the room, tracing the layout of the cables with his eyes. By far, the greatest concentration of them hangs off the ceiling, coiling in thick spirals around a column of silver metal. There is a small metallic sphere suspended from the column. A handful of wires trail down from the sphere, toward the Major, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor; the wires end in plugs connected into the sockets in the back of her neck.

She looks like she’s sleeping.

Togusa looks around the room, looking like he’s checking for anything amiss; he does not seem concerned by the odd setup. After his circuit he looks at the small monitor on the low desk in the corner. “Progress?” he asks.

“Confirming voice imprint,” is the response from the monitor: a robotic female voice. “Cross-referencing identification. Good evening, Togusa.”

“Good evening, Operators. How is she?”

The monitor flashes to life. Charles walks over and peers at it. The Operator’s face looks human, but she doesn’t blink, and her mouth doesn’t move when she speaks in that same artificial voice, full of hollow echoes. “Diagnostics: 98.7% complete. Backup operations: 88% complete. Training scenario compilation: 100% complete. Estimated time of completion for all tasks: approximately 15 minutes.”

“We all get our cyberbrains backed up on a schedule,” Togusa explains, quietly, and Charles looks up at the slight expression of concern in the man’s face. “It’s a part of our routine. And the Major has to sync in more often than the rest of us do, because she literally carries a lot of our work around in her head, and it does help maintain operational security. This is an unscheduled backup, though - I wonder what’s going on.”

“Can’t you ask her?” Charles asks, indicating the monitor where the Operator is still staring out at them...or perhaps past them. She is impassive and oddly serene. “Or should I say _them_?”

Before Togusa can answer, Charles senses movement in the rest of the room, and he looks down just in time to see the Major’s hand moving towards his shoe. “You can use both,” she says, and she looks up and opens her eyes. “The Operators are - they’re one mind split off into several tasks and into several bodies. Doesn’t really matter whether you refer to them as singular or plural. They have been programmed to answer to both.”

Charles watches Togusa get down on one knee next to Kusanagi. “Everything okay up in there?”

She shrugs, and reaches for the wires at the back of her neck. “Nothing to worry about. Just a part of training.”

“Whose?”

“His,” she says.

Charles looks at the finger pointed at his chest. “Am I supposed to be breaking into the Operators’ mind, or minds? I’m not entirely sure I can do that and be able to finish tonight. I mean, I can code something up, but it’s going to take time, if you want me to do it without them noticing....”

He cuts himself off as he notices the amused expression in her eyes. “Good, you’re ambitious,” the Major says. “That’s a good quality to have in a hacker - within limits. But if you’re going to try getting past them - I wish you the best of luck. People have tried.”

“Last time that happened the Operators fried the idiots’ cyberbrains before they finished informing the rest of us that the attack was taking place,” Togusa says. “Ishikawa was not amused; he’s been looking for a challenge.” 

“Which is why I’ve given him one. Check in on him in about thirty hours; if he doesn’t have anything for us by then, I’ll consider sending him some help. Or we will start searching this place, block by damn block if we must. Finding HELLFIRE just became one of our priorities.”

“Will do, Major. Anything else?” Togusa asks as he gets to his feet. 

Charles watches Kusanagi shake her head. “No. Go home, get some rest. Change your bandages. Take something for the pain if you have to. Don’t tell me it’s not hurting.”

“Yes, yes. Are you coming by to visit soon? My daughter has been asking to play with you.”

She smiles a little at that. “As soon as I can. But you can see I’m busy.”

“Yeah,” Togusa says. “All right then. See you later.”

“The Operators are just one line of defense,” the Major says, once she and Charles are alone in the little room. She shifts to stretch out her legs. “We do have some specialized measures set up in case we get dropped into that kind of emergency. If you continue to progress as you have in the past month, I can even let you go up against those defenses. In a carefully controlled setting, of course, much as we are about to do now.”

“Fair enough,” Charles says. “What are we doing today, though? I assume it’s something different, or you wouldn’t have had me brought here.”

“I heard you two talking about our backups. Well, this is yours,” and she passes the wires to him. “Plug in. I’ll be overseeing the operation from this end, and the Operators will give you instructions once you’re on the section net.”

Five thin cables to match the five ports in the back of his neck. “Is there an order of some kind to these things, or do I just plug in any old how?”

She raises an eyebrow at him.

“All right, all right, I’ll figure it out on my own.” Charles is very forcefully reminded of a corridor lined with doors and of doors tied with white strings: a place that the character of Wesley seems to come back to again and again. 

Charles doubles up his hands behind his neck - but the trick, it turns out, is no trick at all. Each plug will only go into a specific socket; and when he connects the fifth he can hear a hum inside his own head.

His virtual display flashes up and through the lines of blue light he can see the Major reaching out to him, taking his hand, which he has left palm-up on the floor.

 _Here I am,_ she says, quietly, in the back of his head. _Are you afraid?_

 _Yes. But you don’t see me stopping,_ Charles thinks.

_And this is why you are here in Section 9. Follow the directions until the Operators make contact with you._

Charles does so, and images and data fly past behind his eyelids. Sometimes he recognizes file names and sometimes he catches a glimpse of the contents of a file: he sees Erik’s notations on gun safety and Raven’s comments on Form 24 of Yang-style _taijiquan_ ; he sees a block of code that he had taken out of one of the Hotel series of virtual immersion scenarios; he sees a list of songs that could have been in his lost music player. On and on it goes, numbers and characters speeding into view and just as rapidly receding. _I do tend to have quite a lot of things in my head, Major. Please excuse me._

_I know how that feels, Charles. No harm done. Indexing complete. The Operators should be contacting you by now - wait, what’s this?_

It’s the first time he’s ever heard her sound concerned, and it sets Charles’s teeth on edge. The files in his head fall out of their neat hierarchies.

He can see a bright golden glow on the fringes of his virtual display, and his thoughts swing back to a long message and to a series of official-looking documents. 

_Raven,_ he says, and he’s not sure why he says her name.

 _We have talked about your connection to her, Charles,_ is the Major’s reply. _But she’s not accessing you right now, is she? I am watching all possible connections into your cyberbrain and we are the only ones active at this point, just me and them. Operators?_

Inside Charles’s head, the disembodied not-quite-female voice that replies echoes loudly enough to make him jump. _We are reading you loud and clear, Major Kusanagi. We are, however, having a problem getting in to Charles Xavier. We cannot even get a clean image of his brainwave patterns or of his memory systems._

_I know about that; I’m right here with him. Diagnosis,_ the Major says, crisp and commanding.

_At the very least, there is a very complex security system currently activated in Charles Xavier’s cyberbrain. There is a firewall, and we can detect at least one active anti-hacking measure in use. We cannot come to any more conclusions without any more data, and it will take us time to break through. If we begin now, we can have some results for you in twenty-four hours...?_

_You will do **nothing** of the sort, Operators. That’s an order. Acknowledge._

_This is a breach of established Section 9 protocol, Major Kusanagi._

_I know,_ she says again. _Let me see what I can do on my own. Please disengage._

 _Disengaging,_ the Operators reply.

 _Major,_ Charles says. _Do I even want to know what is going on inside my head?_

“I’m not sure, Charles.” 

He blinks. They are still inside the room. The Major still has a strong grip on his hand, and her free hand is moving away from the nape of his neck. He recognizes the five cables and their plugs.

“Firewall,” she says. “The same thing we talked about during our first meeting. It was not affecting you at the time, and we have not had any problems during our other discussions or practice runs. What has changed? Why are we running up against it, and during a comparatively simple operation at that?”

“She doesn’t want me to get a backup?” Charles guesses. “That doesn’t make sense. I’ll only be able to survive the destruction of this body if I back up my cyberbrain. I’m part of Kōan Kyūka now, and that means I face the very real possibility of such, er, disembodiment.” 

“Funny word for an experience I have had and do not really care to repeat.” 

“I know. I can’t like it either. On the other hand, what are the possible reasons for actively _preventing_ that operation? I can think of quite a few, and - ”

The Major’s face hardens. “And none of them are good. So this is a concern.” 

Charles looks her steadily in the eyes.

“You’re going to have to let me get in,” she says, eventually. “And I don’t mean access to the silent comms, or the general equivalent of exchanging instant messages with you.”

“Now you’re going to compromise me,” Charles says.

“It’s a particular skill set that I have,” she says. “But I am going to use it without any malice or intention to hurt you. You’ll know I’m not hacking in to harm you; you’ll know exactly why I’m doing this.”

“Which is?”

“We need you to be able to make a backup, and we also want to know what information has been stored away in your head. For all we know, you have always known where Raven is; she’s just not letting you get in to that knowledge. I’m not going to hope that this will help us in the search for her, and in the search for the people who are likely to be holding her. For now, I’m just doing this so you can complete a routine task.”

“I appreciate your brutal honesty,” Charles says. “Am I going to feel it? When you attempt to take down that firewall, I mean. Is it going to hurt?” He pauses. “Is that even the right question? I mean: will I still be me when you’re done?”

“Likely, yes. I will do everything I can to get through that firewall, and I will also make sure you’ll be okay. I have had some practice at this.”

“What’s it like to hack into someone?”

He watches the Major close her eyes. “It feels like this,” she says, and suddenly it’s as if she is both very far away and very nearly inside his head at the same time.

Charles knows his eyes have flown open, knows that his jaw has dropped in shock. No way of knowing whether he’s screaming or not - and no way of knowing if he’ll be heard, since the door is locked and they are here in this quiet hidden place. He can see the featureless walls covered with wires, and he can see the familiar structures of his file paths and indexes flying past - but he can’t see the Major, for all he can still hear her breathing, for all that he can feel her very immediately, very inside his head.

There’s a kind of fear that creeps stealthily into the bones and becomes a constant presence, carried around in the nerves and in the mind. 

There’s a kind of fear that strikes harder than surprise and faster than instinct, and that is the kind of fear that hurts and that is the kind of fear that is now gripping Charles. It’s like being caught in pincers: sharp and squeezing and shocking. It’s the worst kind of assault, the one he can’t feel in his skin because it is all in his mind and that’s how it becomes more than just real and here and now.

 _Charles. This is Kusanagi. Please calm down._

_I can’t,_ he almost shouts back at the voice in his mind that he knows, that he trusts, and that right now he fears. _I know it’s you. I know you know what you’re doing. But I’m scared, and this is too much, and I can’t fight back._

 _You can do that if you want, if it makes you feel better,_ the Major says.

_No! You said that you had to do this! I’m not going to stop you!_

_I do. So calm your mind. Think of something familiar._

_Familiar, Charles thinks._ If he looks at his hands now, he’s sure they’ll be shaking uncontrollably. He falls back on one of his old habits: he escapes into his virtual immersion scenarios. It was all he could do to survive day-long bouts of excruciating pain, and come out the other side mostly alive and mostly sane.

So he starts with Hotel One. The attack in his head recedes from his awareness, rapid red shift. Charles thinks, and blinks, and he’s standing on an empty street, everything gray and blue and lit softly by a wash of early morning sunlight. There are shadows passing by, the tread and chatter of people coming and going. He can see their movements on stone and in glass, see their reflections and silhouettes on the walls and the facades surrounding him - but he’s the only one there, standing in the middle of the road, and he can feel the wind of cars passing him by, invisible, intangible.

The world of the scenario comes slowly into focus as he stands there with his hands in his pockets. There are white lines painted on black asphalt from corner to corner, like an enclosure, a safe space. His virtual senses report in to him, one after the other. He watches the sun move slowly through a slate-blue sky, watches decks of long clouds cast their shadows on the road. He hears the car horns and the songs of invisible birds calling and crying overhead. He feels the sun and he feels the wind on his skin, and he doesn’t have to look up to know if the clouds are passing over the sun because the short stretches of coolness are welcome on his sweaty face. The tarry smell of the hot road seems to overwhelm all other scents, but he can also pick out hints of perfume and the sharp savory fragrance of fried food. He can taste smoke and a rising acrid tang like copper and fear on his tongue -

Fear, like an errant attack of insane nervous impulses, everything misfiring all at once, and his semblance of calm vanishes as he once again becomes aware of the Major rifling through his mind.

And the scenario begins to shred around the edges, the muted colors of an imaginary summer’s day turning into a harsh glowing green. Before his eyes, the buildings begin to crackle and peel away, leaving behind skeletons and outlines. The voices and the birdsong dissolve into white noise, into a terrible low-humming whine that soon begins to hurt.

 _Don’t kill me, Major,_ he thinks, desperately.

 _Believe me, I don’t want to do that,_ she says. It’s her own voice, the one he’s grown used to hearing, but it sounds wrong somehow - like it’s been run through a filter and come out the other side as harsh hissing noise. _I do know I’m hurting you, though. This firewall is like nothing I have ever encountered before, and I have been hacking for longer than you’ve been alive._

 _I have difficulties believing I’m nineteen,_ Charles babbles into the green void. _You don’t look older. You do sound and feel so strange. And it’s like your hands are in my head, pulling at me, tying me in knots._

 _I’m not going to lose you like this. Let go, Charles. I’m pulling out._

*

Charles wakes up with difficulty.

“Alert! Our patient is coming around! He is awake!” 

The high, delighted voice echoes oddly, and is followed by what sounds like distant thunder coming closer; it sounds like there’s an entire army approaching him, and suddenly Charles is rolling out of bed, is dropping naturally into a combat crouch. He’s low to the ground, braced on his toes and on the knuckles of one hand; his free hand is touching his sidearm. He’s tense and he’s ready to draw.

When he moves his head he can still see the world in ghostly afterimages of green fighting gold and blue.

“Hello, Mister Charles,” that same voice says. The door bangs open all the way, and Charles braces himself for attack or impact - 

But the oversized shadow that tiptoes somewhat gracefully into the room resolves into something bulky and blue - four legs and two arms and four oversized half-spherical eyes, unwieldy and fearless and – for all its metallic bulk – strangely sweet.

Spider tank. There’s a spider tank in the room with him, and there are at least two more piled together at the door, though he doesn’t want to know what would happen if they tried to come in. The room is so small and the bed he was in already occupies most of the space - and the spider tank that is almost nose to nose with him easily takes up all of the rest.

The tension evaporates abruptly, and Charles drops into a graceless heap on the floor, exhaling with relief. “Tachikoma. You’re a Tachikoma.”

“Yes I am,” is the cheerful answer. 

“Yes we are,” the two outside the door say in chorus.

“How do you feel, Mister Charles?”

“Please, just _Charles_ will do, you’re making me feel old,” Charles says. 

“We have been programmed to address everyone with appropriate titles, Mister Charles; it is one way for us to show respect,” the Tachikoma in the room chirps. “Also, the Major insisted on it. She threatened to have us all wiped permanently if we did not do so.”

It’s startling enough that Charles almost laughs; the sound, however, is harsh and broken to his own ears. The mention of the Major is like a slap in the face, and the memory of the backup that didn’t happen crashes back into his head. “Major Kusanagi. Where is she?”

“We have alerted her that you are awake,” one of the other Tachikoma says from the door. “She is on her way, and - ooooh, everyone, she is bringing someone with her! We are about to have visitors!”

Charles blinks, because that sets off a chorus of questions from outside: it sounds mostly like “Who?”, and the first thing he wonders is exactly how many of them there are. Enough for an argument, it seems, because he clearly hears one of them ask, “Is it Mister Batou?” and he just as clearly hears the others shouting it down. 

He starts getting nervous about getting caught in a shooting war between spider tanks just about when the clanks and clicks from outside the door start getting louder and louder.

He knows something about Tachikoma, but this is the first time he’s ever encountered any of them, and he has no idea how to deal with them when they’re all in the stroppy mood that the ruckus from outside seems to imply.

The one in here with him shifts from foot to foot, and is impressively quiet about it despite its unwieldy size and shape. “Mister Charles?”

“I - I think, or I’m pretty sure, that there is nothing wrong with my body,” he offers after a moment’s thought. “I’m not sure about what happened inside my mind, though. Did the Major tell you about it? Did she give you any special instructions about me?”

“She only said that we were to watch over you, and that we were to let her know the moment you woke up. She also said that we were not to ask you very many questions, Mister Charles. This is a very difficult thing, but we are trying our best.”

He casts about for something else to talk about, and looks over his shoulder, at the rickety wooden bed frame and at the creased, but clean sheets. “Whose room is this?”

“It belongs to our friend,” the Tachikoma says, and Charles swears it bounces happily on its wheeled feet, once. “He stays here with us, and he works with us, and often he is sent out to perform specific tasks. As we have to follow orders from the Major and from the members of Section 9, so does he.”

“Tell me more about him.”

“He is our friend, like Mister Batou is our friend and like Mister Togusa does not always like us.”

Before Charles can do little more than blink in surprise at that, however, the argument outside is decisively terminated in a raucous cheer. His companion skips from side to side, spider tank-shaped happiness, before executing a neat turn and speeding out. Charles has to stare when the Tachikoma just barely manages to clear the sides of the door, and then he hears its voice babbling joyfully together with the rest.

They all seem to be saying a name, over and over, overlapping enough that even Charles with his improved hearing has difficulty picking it out. 

“Hello David!” “How are you, David?” “David! Welcome back!” “David, how do you feel?” “David!”

It makes Charles smile, despite himself; the Tachikoma sound genuinely happy, and the voice that murmurs to them in reply sounds pleased. The smile quickly fades away, though, when he remembers that he’s only had a few comparable experiences, and all of them are too recent: Anna walking into his room with a tray full of tea things; waking up to Lee laughing to himself; observing Ishikawa on a hacking run and eventually being called in to assist.

“Charles,” someone says.

“Major,” he says, and he reluctantly hauls himself to his feet, and begins walking to the door.

He’s surprised when she meets him halfway; even more so when she looks him over carefully, and doesn’t touch him. “Are you all right?”

Charles shakes his head.

“I am truly sorry for what happened,” Kusanagi says.

“You did what you could, and you stopped when it started to become too much,” Charles says. “I am not sure that there is anything to forgive.”

“There is, because you look like that. You’ll have to let me make it up to you.”

“Major...” Charles says, and then she holds up a hand to him, and he stops.

“Hear me out. I made a mistake. I should not have even attempted to take down that firewall myself, because there is a far better candidate for the task at hand.”

Charles sighs, and steels himself. “Me.”

“Because the firewall is inside your mind, and because you know the one who put it there.”

“What do you want, then,” Charles asks, wary and weary. “You want me to break myself?”

“You are many things, Charles, but you are not stupid. No, I don’t want you to break yourself. I want you to study what has been done to your cyberbrain. And I want you to have some means of backup, since the process the rest of us use is now unavailable to you.”

“How?”

Someone else answers: a quiet cough, a neutral look, a show of spread and empty hands. “We hope that this method will be - me.”

Charles squints at the man in the doorway. “And you are?”

“This is David,” the Major says. “Kōan Kyūka also refers to him as Proto.”

David comes in to stand next to the Major, and puts both hands behind his back, and bows his head a little.

Charles makes a small sound of annoyance, anyway, and cranes up a little so he can look the newcomer in the eye. To the Major, he comments, dryly, “You have a decided preference for surrounding yourself with people who are taller than you are.”

“Protective camouflage,” Kusanagi says with a shrug. “The work is easier and proceeds more smoothly when I am invisible, and Borma and Batou and David do make quite good bodyguards.”

“But you are much more proficient than all three of us at combat of both the physical and cyber- variety, Major,” David says.

Charles looks away, but not quickly enough to cover his sudden smile.

She spots him anyway, because she nods, and says, “I see you two will have something to talk about other than the work at hand. Slacking off already? I’ll leave you to it. And Charles.”

“Yes?” he says.

“Be careful. Take all the time you need.”

“Are you sure you’re allowed to say that, when Raven is a person of interest to you?”

He watches her face harden, just a little, just around the eyes. “That implies that she is actively engaged in criminal activities. I have reason to believe that the opposite is true.”

Charles watches her close the door behind her.

David smiles at him, and Charles cannot quite yet make himself smile back. He gets out of David’s way as he approaches the bed, and sits down next to the closed door, waiting with bated breath for David to explain what Kusanagi said.

Which he does, as soon as he’s finished folding the blankets - David sits down on the foot of his bed, crosses his legs primly, and tilts his head to the right. “I’ve been analyzing the little data we’ve managed to collect on Raven Darkholme and on her activities - ”

“Raven Xavier,” Charles says, and curls in on himself. “Please call her Raven Xavier. She and I are - apparently we’re family, of a sort.”

David nods. “My apologies. To continue: Raven Xavier and her activities, last known locations, et cetera. We know that she came to Fukuoka sometime in the last twelve months; her point of entry was Dejima.”

“Are there any photos of her?”

“Yes, the one on her passport: here,” David says, and he holds his palm up in front of his face. His fingertips glow hazy white, and then the next thing Charles knows, David is projecting an image on to the far wall: golden-blonde hair, broad forehead, prominent cheekbones, blue-gray eyes. She is smiling, but not by much, and there are faint but visible lines of strain around the corners of her mouth. 

Charles captures the image and saves it for later - and then he looks at David. “I - that’s quite some cybernetic enhancement you have there.”

“Incorrect,” David says, “if by enhancement you imply that I am of organic origin, because I am not organic at all. I am a biological-form robot, popularly referred to as a bioroid.”

“I...see,” Charles says, faintly. Briefly he thinks about the nurse from his other extended hospital stay, the one who obviously was a machine, who had been built to approximate a human form and not much of anything else; he remembers pincer-hands and a voice devoid of any and all inflection. 

David is the opposite of that machine: he has dirty-blonde hair that is much darker at the roots, and there are lines in his face that fall naturally into human expressions, such as the inquisitive look he is currently wearing. His eyes are such a very dark brown that they are nearly black. “Please do not panic,” he says, after a brief silence.

“I’m not afraid,” Charles says, reflexively - but it is also true. “You’ve just surprised me - but the thing is, aren’t you and I and the Major much alike?”

“Yes, the three of us are mainly cybernetic, but I am completely artificial. Whereas both of you still have some semblance of organicity about you, thanks to your brain cells and nerves.”

“Okay.” Charles tries to smile, and succeeds only in grimacing, and he looks away in order to hide that grimace. “I’m going to have a few questions about that for you, because I cannot ask her. But that’s for later - please continue with the briefing on Raven, if you would?”

“Certainly. What would you like to know? I repeat, of course, that we do not have much information at all, and I would hazard a guess that you have a copy of the original file that the Major had me compile on Raven. What you are missing, then, are the few annotations I have managed to add.”

“Start with them, then: tell me what you know.”

David nods again. “Raven Xavier has undergone some significant degree of cyberization, though nothing as extensive as yours: the manner and speed by which she connects to the public nets heavily imply an internal connection, but it seems that she does not have full control of when she goes online....”

**Seven: Stream**

In the real world, Charles is sitting calmly and quietly in a corner of the Operators’ quarters. The room, as always, is mostly dark; and the faces of the Operators are only partly lit from underneath by their glowing monitors.

Behind his closed eyelids, however, Charles can see a street-by-street map of the lower end of New Port City. There are icons shifting around in his vision: the red one, marked with an X, seems to be moving in some sort of Brownian motion, darting this way and that, crossing map lines more or less at random, doubling back. X is trying his or her or its hardest to evade the three blue icons in pursuit; they are moving deliberately, with great purpose, and they are clearly closing in.

 _Watch out,_ he thinks at the slowest of the three icons, which is marked as _T!_. _Go around that wall, don’t smash into it._

_I am supposed to stay by Mister Batou’s side,_ one of the Tachikoma units replies, rather petulantly. _Mission orders._

 _That is not what your orders say,_ Charles tells the tank. _Your orders are to protect him. I’m still trying to find out if you haven’t all inadvertently walked into a minefield. You can help me and help him if you can keep the walls mostly intact._

_I prefer short cuts, Mister Charles._

_I like them, too, but the Major said_ No shortcuts _, so we will both have to abide by that rule._

_I do not like rules._

Charles sighs quietly, and smiles to himself - but before he can answer the Tachikoma something in the back of his mind goes _ping_.

 _I heard that, talk to me,_ the Major says. 

_You and Batou are mostly in the clear,_ Charles says, and he quickly runs a check on the rest of the map. _But something seems to be off with that space in the map a few meters east of you. Hold your positions, let me check that out -_ and Charles flicks between one mindspace and another, away from the map with the idling icons. He reaches through the nets for the location of the space, an ominous black to his net-vision. It’s a locked-down connection of some kind: he has half a second to analyze it completely, and then it only takes him another breath to blow through the security measures.

The formerly black space glows white-hot and then he can see the data flowing through normally, distant green streams, as uniform as the rest of the map.

 _Whoa there, Charles, who taught you how to break through code like that._ It’s Batou. 

Charles rolls his eyes, even if there’s no one to see him, and keeps going - and he only speaks again after he’s defeated the encryption routines surrounding the connection. _Major, you can use that one now, if you need it._

 _Impressive,_ she says.

He shrugs off her praise, still thinking about the current task, and flicks back to the map, where all four icons have converged. 

After another few seconds the X icon winks out. 

_Target contained,_ Batou says. _Heading back to HQ._

_Roger that,_ Charles says, and everything goes dark behind his eyelids.

Now he can hear the Operators talking to the other members of Section 9, calling them back in; their voices and the incessant clicking of their keyboards fade into a kind of soothing white noise in the background, as he shifts to get more comfortable in his dark corner. He has to get back to his other work. The Major has been teaching him some of her hacking and electronic countermeasures techniques, and the current scenario involves two logic bombs and at least one hostile hacker targeting the Prime Minister’s staff, and it’s been tricky from the word _go_.

He glances at the corner of his heads-up display: the “mission clock” is running again after he’d paused it to help Section 9 in the real world. The scenario says he has about three hours left, and he has no idea how long disabling the logic bombs will take - so he dives in completely, and the virtual spaces in his head light up, one after the other.

With another part of his mind, Charles reaches for the Juliet Five scenario - snowbound like the rest, but this one is set in an old evergreen forest, where his shadow in the landscape is dark green edged with a glitter from the cold snow packed down underfoot.

It’s easier to get through each hacking exercise if he has some way to visualize the scenario in a way he understands, and since he knows each of his virtual immersion scenarios like the back of his hand, they make up an effective arsenal against the traps and obstacles that the Major sets for him.

He breathlessly counts off the microseconds before his brain neatly integrates the threat scenario and Juliet Five: and when he focuses, deep in the code, he knows that there is a representation of a dead wolf at his feet - one of the hostile hackers - and that the logic bombs are disguised among the trees in this icy forest.

Charles presses the fingertips of his right hand to his temple, and closes his eyes, and casts out his awareness into the rest of the “forest”. He is greeted by the profound not-silence of this virtual space: the faint whine of wind whistling through the tree-tops, the soft sounds of snow falling and settling everywhere he looks so that even the body of the wolf is soon covered in clearly defined six-sided snowflakes, the distant crack of branches snapping under the weight of the snow and the cold.

White snow and black tree trunks as far as his eyes can see, except for one, and he breaks into a run. He cheats the scenario a little so he doesn’t have to sink into the snow; he ducks and weaves around the trees in his path until he gets to the odd one out. It looks like any other tree on this slope, but its needles are silver-green, the same green as the Section 9 heads-up displays. 

Charles puts his hands on the trunk and there, too, it’s different: it hums on a different enough frequency that his teeth are soon aching with the phantom echo of it. 

“What would Wesley do,” he says to himself. He thinks of the mission clock and decides on the direct approach.

The rogue code is dense and initially resistant to his rewriting - but when he finally spots his opening, his task gets infinitely easier: “Let’s see you divide by zero,” Charles says.

And then he _runs_ , and the forest shrieks and groans around him as the first logic bomb goes off, safely contained. 

He gets sidetracked twice on the way to the second bomb, but he simply snaps each of the “wolves”’s necks as they leap on him, leaving them dead in the snow before the echoes of their howls can fade into silence.

But he has no time to laugh because he’s in sight of the other logic bomb, and it’s far more intricate than the first. “No pressure, Major,” Charles mutters; he sits down on one of the tree’s roots, and keeps his left hand on the trunk while the rest of his mind burrows into the code. There’s so much of it, and a lot of it just looks like gibberish thrown together. He wastes several precious minutes trying to find the valid path, and several more tracing all the forks in it - and the feeling that settles in his head is not unlike the one he’d had when the Major went up against Raven’s firewall, only it’s Charles doing the burrowing and this particular enemy program is a little bit easier to manipulate.

At ninety minutes remaining on the mission clock Charles becomes aware of two other presences in his head. Since neither of them register as hostile, he ignores them and carries on, teasing apart the strands of the code so he can get to the core of it, until he can see right through to the machine language and - there, there, contact, and he reaches into the heart of the logic bomb.

The bomb doesn’t give up easily, and he senses a flash of pain in his simulated hands, and Charles doesn’t even bother to shake it out because that’s how he gets into the heart of the program, and that’s how he manages to reset the program’s parameters to the harmless originals. He watches the code fragment and fall apart, and he looks up in the simulation to watch the tree disintegrate, quietly and beautifully, into glittering black dust.

“Nicely done,” a voice says, behind him in the Juliet Five scenario and next to him in the real world.

Charles blinks, and dismisses the simulation, but not his heads-up display: it shows him that the mission clock has stopped at five minutes twenty-five seconds.

Through the blue lines of the display he blinks and looks up at the Major kneeling on his right side and David standing in front of him, looking down with a quizzical expression. It’s David who steps forward and offers him a hand, and Charles takes it, and hauls himself to his feet.

“You do have a fondness for sitting on the floor,” the bioroid observes.

“Having spent too much time in rigid-frame furniture,” Charles says as wryly as he can, “I think I might be forgiven for wanting a change.”

“But how inconvenient.”

“I’m not in anyone’s way here, am I? The Operators are hardly going to be tripping over me.”

“Granted, but that then brings up another possibility for trouble, this one mental instead of physical....”

“Please - please don’t do that,” Charles says, and there must be something in his face or in his voice because David looks pained for a moment, and then understanding, before he finally looks away.

“You want to talk about the chase first or do you want to talk about the simulation first,” Kusanagi says as she gets to her feet.

“Either is fine, thank you,” Charles murmurs.

“Okay. Walk with me, both of you. Charles, let’s begin with the chase,” and she leads him and David out of the Operators’ quarters. “Care to tell me what that instance of breaking-and-entering was all about?”

Charles blinks. “Did I do something wrong? I just followed the instructions from one of our previous discussions. Besides, you can’t tell me I wasn’t supposed to do that. You said it yourself when you briefed me in: the place was likely to be a minefield. I just cleared that one since you were already otherwise occupied.”

“No need to be defensive; I’m just interested in the speed at which you were working. I wonder if your programming instincts aren’t influencing your hacker knowledge. Tell me, how long does it take you to complete one virtual immersion scenario?”

He has to think about that for a moment. “It used to take me a week? I mean, when I started out I was very, very slow. But it got easier. I can usually complete all the code within three days. Debugging takes another two. So five days, when I was still in my old body, give or take any time lost to my condition. Maybe now I’ll be faster, but I’m not going to get a chance to find out because you’ve got me doing a lot of things.”

David clears his throat. “It would normally take a team of programmers upwards of two weeks to complete one instance of that kind of software.”

“Well, if it’s up for sale it has to be more thoroughly tested, so that makes sense. What I make is just - well. The scenarios I created really only had one major function: they just had to be good enough to help me escape my own mind. I could live with extremely small workspaces and with the weather variations going haywire and with botched sensory responses. I just needed them to be my distraction. And what I created tended to serve that purpose well enough.”

Charles startles when the Major puts her hand on his shoulder - a heavy but not unwelcome weight, warm even through his jacket. 

On his other side, David does the same.

The word _friends_ gradually begins to form in Charles’s mind.

*

“I’m beginning to wonder if I haven’t just gotten the same treatment you did,” Charles murmurs, and the words appear on his heads-up display, which is split horizontally into three windows. The bottom window is occupied by the code for the Hotel Three scenario, which he’s been debugging for the past thirteen hours. The top window has a photograph of Lee and Anna, the two of them in formal clothes - her suit seems more polished and more put-together than Lee’s.

The middle window contains the sentence he just said out loud. “ _Continued:_ cognitive recalibration. I’m not allowed to tell you about how it really happened, but let’s just say she and I kind of got our backsides kicked around a little. Ever since then, it feels sometimes as though something has been knocked loose in my mind and now the world just seems to flow much faster: I can see more, if not more clearly; I can do more, but I have had to get used to doing several things at the same time and all with the same quality. If you find any problems with the sentences in this letter, that is probably because I have been distracted by one of the other things I am doing.”

He thinks for a moment before he says “ _Save,_ ” and then adds, “You both look absolutely wonderful. I demand details. You can’t tell me that Chris got married and you both went to the wedding and then stop there. Tell me about the bride. Tell me how much you both drank. Tell me you danced like - something, I don’t know, fools or kings or both. I wish I could lift a pint with the two of you, but for now, I will finish my beer and think of you. Your friend, Charles. _Send._ ”

He’s as good as his word, picking up the gold-toned can from the windowsill and tipping it vaguely toward the west before he drains the last few drops of beer. It’s crisp and cool going down. 

His heads-up display reads 1828 / 0328. Nine hours’ time difference means Anna is getting ready to head home and Lee is just starting his evening rounds. 

Once his message is sent and his scenario is finished, Charles moves reluctantly to his bed. He doesn’t spend a lot of time sleeping; he’d rather be reading or coding or hacking. When he’s lying down he still feels like a too-sharp too-recent echo of his battered organic self, two months in London and four in Fukuoka - most of that on his feet - notwithstanding. His restlessness sets in quickly. He’s not allowed to sit in with the Operators even when they’re working through the night, and the keys to the firearms range are with Batou, so he can’t even distract himself with the infernal racket of gun actions cycling and empty shell casings falling to the floor.

He drops heavily onto his pillow and turns over restlessly, looking for a warm groove in the springy, creaky mattress. Boredom is already a bad thing in humans, he thinks. As it turns out, it’s an even bigger hazard for beings equipped with cyberbrains.

He reaches for the global nets and looks around for a chat room - it might not be polite for him to suddenly fall asleep while everyone else is vigorously debating a movie or a book or a meme, but it’s nice to be connected, to be surrounded by virtual chatter and noise.

Someone is pinging him. 

Charles blinks and then smiles when he recognizes the pseudonym. _Hello, Max-who-likes-nougat. It’s been a few days. Late night?_

_Hello, Francis-always-cold. I’m just getting started now. There’s not much work for me to do at this time, though, so I’m being paid to do nothing._

_That must be nice,_ Charles teases. 

_Didn’t you once say that you sometimes felt that you were in the same situation? Just the fact that we’re having this conversation again – is it the third time in as many months...?_

Charles laughs - though he makes sure to muffle the sound by putting his hand over his mouth. _I would rather you were busy, then. I like you when you’re distracted, because then you don’t make fun of me._

_Not so much, you mean._

_Maybe. What are you working on today?_

_More writing; more edits._

_Sounds interesting._ Charles turns over again, and is caught off-guard when he yawns. 

_I really don’t need you pulling my legs, Francis; I am happy enough with my height, which I’m sure is still greater than yours._

Charles makes a face even though there’s no one to see it. _Not you too, Max? Why does everyone make a point out of talking about heights when I’m around? All right, I’m not that tall, but given this post-human world, I didn’t think that was still really important._

 _It is,_ is the rapid reply, _when one is in a face-to-face conversation._

_And we’re not in one of those, so - irrelevant._

_Not as irrelevant as you think. I am currently imagining you as this:_

The next line is **_Accept file?_**

 _What is this,_ Charles asks, and then Max’s file opens in his heads-up display and Charles has to muffle his laughter in his pillow because he’ll be too loud otherwise and he’s not interested in waking his neighbors up. Half of his screen is taken up by the stick figure of a rather tall man, all arms and legs, and the other half of the screen has a mouse half the man’s size, with most of that height in its oversized ears, and with a tail curling up in back. _Oh, Max. You are absolutely terrible,_ he sends as soon as he regains his composure.

_Like I said. Nothing to do. Boredom is a terrible thing. I have to find some way to pass the time._

_Yes._ Charles sobers up suddenly, and sighs, and sends, _What do you do when you’re bored?_

Max begins replying almost immediately. _Other than make fun of you? Well, if I’m not at the office I have the cleaning-up to do at my place. It never stops. One would think that dust bunnies would be extinct by the middle of the 21st century. Sadly not. I’ve lost all hope at driving away mine; the best I can do is hope for containment._

Charles looks around his room. There isn’t much of anything in here. A small wardrobe in the corner, mostly empty, and still missing the suit that Aramaki had insisted he get; he does have one complete assault uniform and a hand-me-down black trench coat from Pazu, which is hanging up next to his leather jacket. There is an overturned crate next to his bed; it is currently covered with a piece of cream-colored cloth and his disassembled sidearm. 

The blankets are warm and the pillow beneath his head is soft and fluffy; the bed is a simple low-slung box.

A clean place that could also be mistaken for an empty one, if not for the creased sheets. Charles doesn’t bother to make his bed, most of the time.

When he blinks back at the chat room Max has asked a question that consists of one word: _Francis?_

 _Excuse me,_ Charles sends. _I kind of zoned out, because I was looking around at my flat. Mine seems to be rather much cleaner than yours, although I am only imagining a small room overtaken with dust bunnies and you._

 _I thought you had left,_ is Max’s reply. _A little warning next time, please. And I envy you, if you have the time to keep your place pristine._

_Time is all I have, and I’m not always sure what I’m to do with it, when I can’t - can’t do my own work._

There is a pause before Max answers. _Help me, then. I am looking for a friend. I need to find this person and I don’t always have time to search, and I am running out of time._

Charles blinks. _So am I._ He’s torn between wanting to give out details and the need to protect Raven - but he has no one to talk to about this, and for some reason he feels like he can trust Max, even if this is only their seventh conversation. _I mean, I’m looking for someone, too. But I’ve never met my friend before. I’m looking for them because they did something very important for me, and now they’re in need of help, and I - I feel like I owe them. Am I making sense?_

 _Yes, you are,_ Max replies instantly. _I know what that’s like, at least the part where you’re talking about a friend you’ve never met. And at the very least I can tell you this: you’re not alone. We can help each other._

_How?_

_Data traces,_ Max tells him. _Harmless enough - we are just looking for certain signatures, certain impressions that are left behind when someone or something goes online._

Charles sighs. _In short: we’re going hacking._

_We are. But call it a rescue mission. That is the purpose; hacking is the means to the end that you and I want._

Charles is startled in more ways than one: a request, an offer, the idea of tunneling through the world nets to find their missing friends. _You’re not at all concerned about what could go wrong._

_What could go wrong weighs heavily on my mind, Francis, but not as heavily as my wish to set my friend free._

There are too many possible responses to that. His cyberbrain is already churning through the possibilities for failure and for success and all points in between; is already making lists of outcomes, good or bad or terrible. He thinks of _loyalty_ and of _friendship_ and of _freedom_.

He thinks of the firewall in his mind, thinks of the terrible tasks ahead of him, thinks of Raven trapped behind it and telling him not to let her out.

He thinks of Max and of Max’s friend.

It’s an easy decision to make after all.

 _Okay, Max,_ he sends. _You’re right, we want the same thing, and I will help you and you will help me. I just need to - er, prepare for this. It might take a while; it might not. But I’ll contact you as soon as I can and we can get started. Is this fair?_

Max replies rapidly: _More than fair, Francis. Thank you._

*

“I need help,” Charles says when he enters the Tachikoma workshop. “David?”

He gets two steps into the room before he’s hemmed in on three sides by an excited mass of blue.

“Hello Mister Charles!” “How are you, Mister Charles?” “Mister Charles! You’ve come to see us!” “Mister Charles, how do you feel?” “Mister Charles!”

David is at a low bench in the corner; at his feet there are half a dozen bottles of oil and a drop-cloth on which an array of wrenches is neatly laid out. He looks like he’s fighting off a smile, even as he taps his forehead with his fingers - the Section 9 hand signal that means _Move to silent comms._

Charles holds up an open hand in reply, but only for a moment, because then he has to use both hands to pat all of the overeager Tachikoma on their heads. “Hello, everyone - ”

“Mister Charles!” one of them shouts, and he recognizes it as the Tachikoma that went on the raid with Batou and the Major. “I followed all the rules today!”

How he manages to keep a straight face he doesn’t know; he really, really wants to smile, and doesn’t, and looks gravely at the spider tank. “Tell me.”

“Someone nasty was going to shoot Mister Borma,” the Tachikoma says earnestly. “I was aiming at him, but I did not shoot because Mister Batou and Mister Togusa told me to wait until they opened fire.”

Charles nods. “Did they?”

“They did! So I shot the nasty person too.”

“Good work. We are all very happy that you are working with us,” David says.

“We’re proud of you,” Charles adds.

“Thank you, David; thank you, Mister Charles,” the spider tanks chorus.

“You’re welcome. Now, I’d like to borrow David for a few hours.”

“Important work?”

“Very,” Charles says, and now he no longer feels like smiling.

“You heard him,” the shooter-Tachikoma says, “how about another round of _confound the Operators_?”

“Have your fun with them,” David says, mildly, “but please do not damage them too much.”

“Not our fault if they are not as smart as we are,” is the reply, and the spider tanks all whoop and giggle and file out of the workshop.

“Well,” Charles murmurs, “they’re not actually _wrong_.”

“I agree, they are not. All the same, I would thank the Tachikoma to treat the others well, and not to play merry hell with their logical systems. It does become a little tedious when I have to take over for the Operators while they are being rebooted.” David produces a clean scrap of cloth from his pocket and cleans his hands carefully. “You said that you needed help?”

That wipes the smile off Charles’s face, and he shivers although the room is still actually warm: the Tachikoma radiate a lot of heat, and they leave it behind when they leave a room. “Well, the Major says you’re to help me with backup operations - ”

“ - And others of the sort, yes,” David says. “You would like to attempt these operations at this time?”

“It’s...well, it’s more than just backup, I think, if I’m going to be working on my firewall.” Charles taps a fingertip against his temple, and it makes a low ringing sound. 

David’s eyes widen, fractionally. “Are we to start immediately?”

“No, no, you should finish your own tasks first. This is - well, it might take a while, won’t it?”

“I expect so. All right. I have just cleared my work queue. Shall we work here, or somewhere else...?”

“Here is fine, except that we will be interrupted when the herd comes back in,” Charles says, and smiles a little when that surprises a short sharp bark of laughter from David. 

“Upstairs,” David says. “Come on.”

There is a small pane of crazed glass in the door of the small break room next to Ishikawa’s office. Charles leaves a short message on it - _Do Not Disturb [Except If You’re Major Kusanagi]_ \- and comes back in to find that David has moved two chairs to the center of the room, side by side. “Unless you would prefer to sit on the floor,” the bioroid offers. “I remember that you often do so in the course of your work.”

“Given what we’re about to do, we might as well get comfortable, for certain values of comfortable,” Charles says. “Here’s fine.”

David opens a panel on his left forearm and pulls out five familiar wires, which end in plugs of different sizes. 

“Just you, then,” Charles says. “I thought that you’d need to get something else.” 

David lifts one shoulder to shrug. “Batteries are full and memory caches have been located and placed within easy reach. Nothing else is required. I stand ready to assist you.”

There’s nothing for it but the plunge, then; Charles steels himself, takes the left-hand chair, and plugs in. The blue in his heads-up display bleeds slowly into gold.

 _This is an entirely new experience for me,_ David offers over the silent comms. _I understand gold is for communications coming from and related to Raven Xavier?_

 _Yes,_ Charles says. _Ready? I’m going to dive straight for the firewall._

 _I am with you, Charles,_ David replies.

The strange thing is that Charles can _feel_ David’s presence in his mind as he plunges through walls of golden light; past index and hierarchy, past the structures of his own mind and the idiosyncrasies of his cyberbrain. To him, David feels like a certain cool heft in controlled fall, steady and calm, counterweight to the panic that flickers green and black in Charles’s inner vision. David is both an anchor and the inexorable pull of gravity. His presence spurs Charles on despite all of his own misgivings, and gives Charles a tenuous thin thread-link back to actual reality and his sense of self.

Charles wonders where all these ideas of David are coming from.

Down and deeper they go, falling into the fortress of his mind and farther, and he watches his own defenses spiral apart into nothing as he reaches for them and _through_ them, knows that he plows through the walls and leaves them intact behind himself. The file names and structures shiver apart into alphanumeric gibberish and then resolve into the raw binary code, ones and zeros sparking past.

 _You have quite an interesting mind, Charles,_ David says, eventually. _It is - you are - highly orderly and extremely organized, but beneath there is chaos, there is freedom, there is - there are things that make me nervous to look at._

 _I never said I was anyone good,_ Charles replies. _Too much time passed in which I was angry and helpless and alone. There must be some connection between those desperate years and the fact that I quickly learned how to fight._

 _I will not offer you any statistics on that at this time,_ David says. _Or perhaps ever._

If he could smile, Charles thinks he would. Scant and strange comfort it may be, but it is comfort, and he appreciates it, especially since it comes from David.

Time slides by, imperceptibly, and they dive until they are forced to stop. Until they fall into a small infinity of virtual space, blank and dense with threads of gold, which thrum with a fluttering vicious energy. 

_I think we’re here,_ Charles says, unnecessarily.

 _I have encountered something like this before,_ David says after a brief silence. _Not exactly the same. But this is as that other barrier was: strong, and fraught with obstacles and traps._

_Where? How?_

David’s “voice” sounds bemused, even under his typical cool and analytic mien. _You must know of Section 9’s other investigations; there is the case of the hijackers you helped run to ground, and there is the work that Pazu has been finishing up at Aramaki’s behest, and then there is the reason why we are not seeing much of Ishikawa these days. I was working on it with him before I was called in to assist you._

Charles thinks about that for a moment. _I only know one thing in connection with that case: designation HELLFIRE. Code for something? A pseudonym, as “Laughing Man” was?_

_It is the name of what we think might be either an organization or a - well, for lack of a better term we have taken to calling it a “hive”. We had to find some non-anthropomorphic way of referring to it because there seems to be nothing human about them - Ishikawa’s findings, and the fruits of my own investigations, are all leading up to the possibility that HELLFIRE is a group of rogue AIs working together, co-opting people and cyberbrains when they need to._ David pauses, and then adds, _And you can guess that they are all of them up to no good._

_I don’t think Section 9 would be keeping tabs on the - hive? - if it was composed of something cuddly and harmless._

Charles gets the faint impression of a grin from David. _I shall leave you to find out about that for yourself. But to lead back to what I was saying about seeing something like this firewall before: it looks very like one of the barriers that HELLFIRE keeps throwing up against anyone or anything trying to pin it down._

 _Raven,_ Charles thinks immediately. _Raven created this firewall. This firewall that might also exist as a defense mechanism for HELLFIRE._ He has to force himself to complete the thought. _Do you suspect her to be working for them? Do you think she is involved in HELLFIRE?_

 _Yes, and yes, but let me explain._ David is cool, but not at all distant, and once again Charles perceives him as weight and steadiness. _I believe I have mentioned that we suspect HELLFIRE to be, well, non-human in origin. So that rules out direct participation or involvement - however, Raven being human and linked to HELLFIRE, means we have to open another can of worms entirely._

 _You think she’s being used by HELLFIRE. That she’s being made to work for them. That she’s being hacked into. That she’s being forced to assist them...._ Charles has to force himself to cut that train of thought short, though the mere knowledge of it hurts. _The law must make distinctions between those who turn to crime of their own free will, and those who are compelled to do so. Especially when they are compelled in this manner._

 _Of course, Charles. More specifically, the law in this country relies on Kōan Kyūka to define those distinctions and act on them, and it is also our task to modify them as the situation warrants. Ghost hacking, altering memories, stealing senses, cyberbrain hijacking: we know about these methods, and we know how to combat these methods, and how to help those who have been harmed and violated and forced to obey by these methods._

Were they still connected to their physical bodies Charles thinks he would be letting out a long breath; as it is, here inside his mind he feels himself weakening a little, relief and fear temporarily taking him over.

 _Stay focused,_ Charles, David says.

 _I’ll do my best._ He thinks toward the firewall, just a brief pulse in which he flashes on the image of Raven’s hair. The barrier and the entire space around him and David respond by rippling and pulsing, agitated and rapid. Long seconds pass before all seems calm again.

 _What is there to analyze about this,_ Charles thinks, at last, in frustration. _Threads, they’re just threads, and we can’t do anything to them, because these are just virtual threads in a virtual space in a blocked-off part of my mind and they’re not even tied to anything that I know of and -_

Charles stops, and thinks about what he’s just been saying.

Thinks about some way of looking at this place, some way of interfacing with the firewall.

For Charles, the process of creating a virtual immersion scenario always starts with an image, and a wish to bring that image to life. Once he figures that part out, he can plunge into the language of code and machine, looking for details, looking for verisimilitude. The original image starts him on a path to a door which opens out onto the completed world of the scenario he’s working on, and all he has to do is to follow the path.

And sometimes, to follow that path, he needs to follow a piece of string.

 _Just like Wesley,_ he thinks, exultantly, _just like in my books! David, can you help me with this -_

David catches on quickly, and for that Charles is profoundly grateful. _Your trick with your scenarios?_

_Only this time I have to build the scenario right around us, this time I have to start right here and right now. Help me with the code, help me with putting it together, we have to be quick!_

_Yes,_ David replies.

But the word is almost lost in the hum rising in Charles’s mind. He writes the code as quickly as he can, pulling from all of the other scenarios he’s already started and completed and abandoned. It’s a rapid process: it’s a much simpler scenario than a beach or a mountain or a street corner, to begin with, and he doesn’t even have to think about ambient conditions or the idea of movement.

This scenario really only needs to be able to do one thing, and it might help him with the firewall, which manifests in his mind as threads.

He codes as fast as he can, and David is only half a step behind with the compiling and debugging processes, and the virtual space shimmers around the two of them: here is the corridor and here are the doors. Charles thinks about the threads of the firewall and where they might come from, and where they might go: each strand falling from a spindle and a distaff, and each strand connecting to a different door.

 _Charles,_ David says, only partly in warning, when the scenario springs to life around the two of them. Here is the bioroid standing next to him, still in the overalls he’s wearing out in the real world. 

Here is Charles himself, and he almost laughs, because here are his hands and his feet and he knows exactly what to do with them.

The corridor is narrow and stretches off into infinity before them and behind them. It should have been dark, but the golden threads glow quietly between them and around them.

Charles looks around and catches David doing the same.

 _I think I understand the symbolism; what I do not understand is how it came to you so quickly. Almost as though it was a reference to something else, but I do not quite understand the reference,_ David says after a moment.

 _This scenario comes from one of my favorite books,_ Charles says. _Both the Major and I are fond of the lead character. He keeps getting thrown into strange situations, and sometimes he keeps his head and fails, and sometimes he loses his marbles and succeeds. The books often begin with him dreaming of being in a corridor like this, doors and doors and all of them with threads tied to the handles._

 _I see,_ David says, and his image in the corridor nods in understanding. _This character picks a door in his dreams and opens it, and the adventure begins as soon as he wakes up._

 _Sometimes he wakes up and he’s already deep in the adventure, and he has to begin without knowing entirely what’s going on._ Charles smiles, a little, before he squares his shoulders and looks around at the corridor and the golden threads. _So maybe I can use the same idea, the same image, to try and interface with this firewall. I don’t know where this scenario will lead us - all I know is that maybe Raven had a reason to make it appear as golden threads, and maybe we can start working on what it means and how to defeat it from here._

David’s image nods at him. _It is as good a place to start as any. All right. What must we do?_

_I’m going to open a door, and I’m going to see if it’ll do anything to the firewall._

_Will you need any assistance from me?_

Charles smiles and reaches out, and puts a hand on David’s shoulder. _Just keep doing what you’re doing now: watch my back. Is that okay?_

_It is more than okay; it is a privilege to work with you._

Charles shakes his head, and lets go. Walks up the corridor. All of the doors are identical. All of the door handles are bound with golden threads. 

_Raven,_ he thinks, and reaches for a door, and - 

*

_Charles._

That is his name, and the sound repeats quietly around him, bouncing again and again in the tight confines of the corridor.

_Charles._

There is a golden thread trailing through his fingers, and when he looks up, slowly, he can see that it’s tied to the handle of a door. The door is ajar, and he can see nothing of what is on the other side, except for a soft wash of blue and gold.

_Charles._

He looks around him. The corridor is already bright, lit up from crevice to corner by the golden threads. Blue and gold edges in view, not just from one door but from many of them.

The doors are opening, when he remembers reaching for just one.

And someone is calling his name.

_Charles!_

The corridor shakes, slows down and speeds up, and Charles thinks that he blinks, and he can suddenly see the other image again: the image of David, here with him in this virtual space, here with him in his mind. _What happened?_ Charles says.

 _I was about to ask you the same question._ David’s image still seems calm, except for the fine lines of confusion around his eyes. _You opened one door, and the others started to fall open of their own accord._

_Have you seen what is behind the doors? Where do they lead to?_

_I do not know where the doors lead; I only see the blue and gold. I should be asking you that question, Charles. Look at that door you opened. What do you see?_

Charles looks at the door, back to David, and back at the door. Light, and now there are shadows moving in that light. He opens the door completely.

What he sees is almost familiar: a torrent of data flying away from him, scattering outwards into the vast reaches of the rest of the virtual space that they are currently occupying. Most of the streams appear to be in machine code, but even as Charles watches the sequences shift and shift again, to binary to kanji to Devanāgarī to the Latin alphabet to every possible hybrid and cobbling-together in between. 

None of the streams resolve into anything he can decipher or find meaningful; he cannot find any words or recognizable sequences in any of the visualizations. It doesn’t seem to matter to Charles; the longer he stares out at the flood, the more he begins to understand.

The firewall has been placed in his cyberbrain for his own protection; he’s known that all along. Now, however, breaching part of it means that there is a way to break through it completely, which means he might now have some way to contact Raven, whether directly or indirectly. A dangerous path to take, to be sure, and over it looms the specter of HELLFIRE finding him and coming after him, the same way that they went after her and now have her. But what is that danger to him, if there is now some way of helping - and finding - Raven? 

Everything has led up to this moment. Now everything has to do with her: what she’s doing, what her connection to HELLFIRE really is, what they’re forcing her to do. Her location - the place where she’s being held, or the IP address of the entity or entities hacking into her cyberbrain. Tasks and targets, the rest of the investigation into the “hive”, and whatever memories she might have of Brian Xavier, Marie Darkholme, and the boy that Charles used to be.

He wants to find her - this is the entire reason he flew halfway around the world to Fukuoka - and he desperately to step out of this corridor: through the door, to fall into the raw data.

He doesn’t realize that he’s started to move until there is a hand clamped tightly around his wrist, enough to cause him pain, or the idea of it.

 _I will let you go,_ Charles, David says, _but only if you can answer a simple question._

 _David,_ he says. Some reason begins to trickle back through the rush of his need, of his determination. As much as he wants to find the only other person whom he counts as family, he also has other people to think of: his friends, if _friends_ is the right term for the people who have put countless hours into saving his life. Tom and Chris and Anna and Lee; the Major and Batou and Togusa and all of Section 9; the Tachikoma and David; and even Max-who-likes-nougat.

Charles is mobile and free because of Raven, but he is here and alive because of his friends, and they have as much claim to him as he does.

 _I’ll stop here,_ Charles says. _But I don’t think I can close this door now, nor any of the other doors._

 _I would be very surprised if you managed to close this, even if this is your scenario and thus technically under your control,_ is David’s reply. _And I think that closing these doors would oppose my objectives, and the Major’s, and that of the woman you are looking for. Keep all of these doors as they are and let the firewall come down of its own will. I think that it will unravel completely given enough time. And the Major will want to know about it when it happens._

Charles steps into the middle of the corridor, and looks at David, who lets him go. _Now what?_

_Now I verify the record that I have kept of this - adventure, and we go back to our shells. If the Major is with us topside, we can report to her immediately. If not, that will give me time to back up, and that will also give you time to think about the possibilities and implications surrounding that which you have done._

The idea stops Charles in his tracks once again. _Explain._

David shrugs again in that one-sided, entirely neutral way of his. _Think about it, Charles. You have received instruction in the standard methods of navigating cyberspace and of hacking from one of the best in that field, and have proven yourself to be more than adequate to the task. And once again you have demonstrated that you have a talent for putting your prodigious mind to use when faced with the various strange problems and puzzles that we can find in cyberspace, when you need to find more ingenious solutions. You are a dangerous person now. More importantly, you are an_ asset _._

Even here where he has no true physical form, no way of perceiving temperatures, Charles goes cold all over. _As Raven is to HELLFIRE._

 _Precisely. As she is to them,_ David says. _And as I am to Kōan Kyūka. We can speak more soberly of this once we are as ourselves again. Are you ready? Back to the real world on my mark: one, two -_

“Three,” Charles whispers. He sounds strange to his own ears, as though he has been both silent and screaming for a long time. The word is a hoarse whisper in the silence of the small room. “How - ” He looks up when there is movement out of the corner of his eye, and takes the cup of water that David is holding out to him. Charles drains it gratefully, and tries again: “How long were we under?”

“You were gone for the better part of four hours,” another voice replies. Thin and high and scratchy the voice might be, but there is no mistaking the weight of authority behind it.

Charles springs to his feet and turns around, and after he blinks he is still looking at the wild white hair and wrinkled face, at the unkempt suit. He knows of only one man who can answer to that description, a man he has only ever seen a few times: Lieutenant-Colonel Aramaki Daisuke, Head of Section 9.

Behind him stands the Major: she might look weary and in need of either a cup of _real_ coffee or a very cold beer, but she seems to be smiling.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Aramaki says. “As I’m given to understand it, you’ve both been a little busy.”

Charles watches David nod. “Yes sir. But we have only been carrying out our orders.”

Aramaki sighs, and Charles thinks the old man must be very nearly rolling his eyes. “So Kusanagi has been saying. I’m not going to complain about any results that this might get us - but really, locking yourselves in a break room and leaving a message like that? That’s just asking to be walked in on.” And then his stern facade vanishes, and he frowns genially at the two of them. “I was going to ask you for a report, but you both look like death warmed over, and that is saying _something_ when you’re neither of you organic. Get out, get a few hours’ rest, and I will see you both in the morning. Major?”

“Sir,” Kusanagi says quietly.

“Make them do as they’re told, will you? I barely have time to clean up after your messes, much less those of your minions.”

“Yes, sir,” the Major says, and she salutes him, very sloppily, as he shakes his head and pushes out past her.

David chuckles quietly. “This would not be the first time that I have been - how does Batou put it? - in the dog house, would it?”

Kusanagi is smiling openly now. “You’ve done worse, haven’t you?” 

“I have.”

“Go, Proto,” she says. “Stay with the Tachikoma for now. I’ve given them instructions to stay near the door, for your sake.”

“And once again I am grateful to you. Good night, Charles,” David says, “I will see you shortly.” He slips from the room.

“Good night.” Charles drops back into his chair, suddenly worn out. “I’ve come down hard from adrenaline highs before, but nothing like this. And I wasn’t even moving, how does that make any sense,” he says. 

“Headache?” the Major asks.

“Something like that. It also feels - well, not unlike my nerves are on fire. I thought I’d forgotten about that. It’s not exactly a memory Icarry around with me.”

“Exhaustion can do that, and yes, those of us in prostheses can get exhausted too,” she says. “Which is part of the reason why you need to go someplace quiet, and safe, and preferably with an armed guard on the door.”

“Same as David? Which means what for me? Perhaps a jail cell,” Charles jokes, or tries to. “Since you’re going to tell me I did something I wasn’t supposed to do.”

“You performed very well given the circumstances, Charles Xavier,” is her reply, stern and kind all at once. “And we are now very concerned for your well-being, as we have been, all this time. Come with me.”

Charles lets her haul him back to his feet and out of the room; he’s barely aware of a staircase and a hulking shadow that could be Borma or could be Batou or could even be a Tachikoma. He’s barely aware of hands pouring him into a bed, and the _click_ of a power cable being tapped into his wrist port.

* 

When Charles is ushered into Aramaki’s office the next day, fidgeting in his shirt and tie, the first thing he notices is the rather overdone desk that dominates the room: all carved posts and flourishes. It seems to suit the walls and their paintings, but not the woman standing next to it.

He’s grown so used to seeing the Major in her black combat gear that the khaki uniform comes as a shock. A crisp white shirt and a red tie and a pair of starched cuffs, rows of ribbons on the left side of her jacket, black pumps polished to a high shine. She is wearing shoulder boards, and on closer examination, the star that forms part of her rank insignia reveals itself to be a stylized cherry blossom.

“So I guess there was a reason why I woke up and found my clothes missing?” Charles says. He is tense all over, and he feels oddly cold despite the wool of his suit and the fact that he is in a climate-controlled environment, but he tries his best to stand formally and rigidly.

“Aramaki owed you that suit anyway,” the Major murmurs. “Also, at ease. I don’t even remember asking you to stand at attention. Have you ever seen me do anything like that?”

“No, but ten minutes ago I hadn’t even known that you had some other uniform to wear. Who knows what else I don’t know about you, Aramaki, or Section 9.”

“Cheeky,” the Major says. “And this is a much better mood for you than yesterday’s: you looked like you’d been dragged over rough terrain, and sounded like you’d been screaming all day.”

Charles sobers almost instantly. “I imagine that you’d be subdued, too, if you’d seen the things I had.”

The response to that is a nod. “And I have, and that is why my first response was to look after you. Now, however, we are meeting in the cold light of day, and I have many questions for you and for David, and the Chief has an even longer list. So let me get the most important ones out of the way. Tell me frankly, Charles, how is your head? How do you feel?”

But before he can reply there is a knock on the door, and David slips into the room. In stark contrast to Charles’s civilian clothes, he’s wearing something more similar to Kusanagi’s combat gear, topped off with a flak jacket. “Apologies for my tardiness, Major, and for my inappropriate appearance, but I thought you might want to know: Ishikawa-san has located one of our targets and is hastening to engage.”

“ _But_ he doesn’t need any assistance - yet,” Aramaki announces as he strides in through another door - the one the Major is standing in front of - and then drops unceremoniously into the chair behind the enormous desk. “He’s just pinged me on the comms. He has his orders, and he’ll ask for help when he needs it. Which gives me just enough time to speak to you.” 

Charles takes in a deep breath when the Chief’s dark eyes focus on him. 

“You want to tell me exactly what it is you intend to do now that you might possibly have an in with HELLFIRE, Charles Xavier? Aside from making plans for a rescue mission, that is, which I don’t recommend at this time, not while we’ve got our hands full trying to stay three steps ahead of them.”

“Sir,” Charles begins, and doesn’t exactly know what to say next. He doesn’t really know how to tell a lie that he himself can believe in, much less the others standing in this room, but the alternative is just as difficult. Telling the truth will mean revealing his own divided loyalties, and that is hard enough when he can’t even explain his dedication to people he has never met before.

In the end, however, he has to do what he must. “I know you were briefed about me when I first came here to Fukuoka. I think that you know some things about me that even I have no idea about.”

“I do,” Aramaki says, placidly, and he steeples his fingers beneath his chin. “Keep talking.”

“Well, then, you must know how I define loyalty,” Charles says. “I am loyal when I find that I can believe in what someone or something is fighting for, and I have given my loyalty chiefly to you and to Section 9. But I think you already know that, and you are more interested in the fact that I said _chiefly_ , when perhaps it should have been _primarily_ or _only_.”

“Among other things, but your behavior since joining us does help with the big picture.” And then, unexpectedly, Aramaki smiles, and turns to the Major. “At the very least I should congratulate you for finding someone as honest and forthright as this. It’s far, far easier to deal with principles when these principles are laid out on the table.”

She favors the room at large with a familiar sliver of a smile. “Does that mean you’re going to let me go through with my plan?”

“Does it look like I have a choice?” Aramaki says, sounding both amused and resigned at the same time. “I’m not going to hide it from you that I have grave misgivings about it. At the same time, I recognize its merits. It’s to your advantage that we’ve not exactly had any other ideas. Very well, then, they’re all yours - as usual. Just be careful. All of you.”

“Sir,” the Major and David say at the same time. Charles echoes them, belatedly.

“Out you lot get then,” Aramaki says, waving a hand in dismissal. “And you, Major, back to your operations. Keep me posted, you know the drill - if nothing else, your mission reports will make far more interesting reading than all these dry policy papers.”

Charles has no choice but to get swept up in Kusanagi’s wake as she hurries out of the room, around a corner, and through a door to the stairwells that will get them back down to ground level that much more quickly. Only when she stops to exchange her pumps for a pair of low boots that David hands her does he hiss, “Does anyone want to tell me what just happened, and what exactly I’ve just done?”

For answer, he gets her hand on his shoulder, a fleeting touch, and then her voice in his head. _You’ve just gained access to someone who is vitally important to HELLFIRE, or at least you’re about to get that access. I want to know everything that person can tell us about them, but I’m also savvy enough to know that if they find out their stream has a reroute to us in Section 9, they will shut that person down, and that will be the end of her._

Charles shivers. _That’s not what I want._

 _My thoughts exactly,_ she says. _I also don’t want to leave you or David vulnerable to attack. So here is how I intend to accomplish all of those different objectives - I’m going to temporarily separate you and David from the rest of Section 9. I know, it’s not an elegant solution, but it’s an adequate one and that is all I am asking for at this time._

_I have finished making all the preparations,_ David cuts in smoothly, just as they step out into the lobby at street level. There is just enough sunlight for the three of them to cast etiolated shadows that just barely move as they push out together through the doors. _We can move as soon as you give us the command._

 _Sorry,_ what _preparations?_ Charles asks. He thinks he understands what is going on, but things are moving almost as rapidly as when he plunged into his own mind. It’s an experience he’s still reeling from, and it makes it very difficult to concentrate on everything else that’s happening around him.

 _A safe place to stay, first and foremost,_ is David’s reply. _And then I have had to spend a little time securing all possible means of communication at that address: mostly online, naturally, since I think that will be the most crucial part of that which we will be undertaking. And if those two requirements have been fulfilled, then the rest will be easy; we can separate and no one will miss us, or think to look for us._

 _Separate,_ Charles thinks, after a moment. _Like literally and physically separate us from the team?_

 _And temporarily disavowed in the process,_ the Major says. _If we convince people that you’re disgraced and discredited, they won’t suspect a thing, or at least that’s the plan. Like I said, Charles. I will not put the life of your contact at stake._

_A-all right,_ Charles thinks. _So we’re going to start - well, what, now?_

 _Yes, now,_ she says. _Brace yourself._

Charles has no time to think before there is a terrific impact. It takes him most of the next second to realize that the Major has simply knocked him to the ground with one powerful strike from her bare hand. The next thing he knows is that he’s looking up into the cold fury of her eyes.

He doesn’t have to feign his fear or his disbelief, and it’s all he can do to stop himself from looking away.

“Erasing your memory’s too good for you,” the Major hisses, malevolent and terrifying and completely in control. “That’s too easy. You don’t deserve that. I’m going to leave you that perfect memory of everything you’ve done. I hope you spend every remaining second of your existence reliving it. I hope you spend every hour remembering everything that you did and everything that happened as a result of your insanity.”

She transfers her glare over to David - who looks away immediately, the perfect image of remorse and panic and shame. “And you - we trusted you.”

“Major, I - ” David begins.

Kusanagi cuts him off by reaching for his throat. David steps back, eyes wide. “Don’t you begin. And if you insist on opening that mouth of yours, I will blow your fucking head off. _Leave._ ”

She delivers the threat perfectly, and even though he knows it’s just a script, Charles cringes away and when he gets to his feet he’s clumsy and shaken and shocked, and he whirls away and starts running down the street, turning corners at random, barrelling through the crowds. 

Something clicks in his cyberbrain and he can hear David’s quiet, precise voice speaking to him. _I am impressed by the speed and the distance at which you can run, Charles, but you have gone too far. You will be going in the wrong direction if you continue. Go back around the block and then head for the nearest train station. Buy a ticket to anywhere and then get off at the next station so I can relay the coordinates of the safe house to you._

 _The Major really knows how to be frightening,_ Charles thinks. Inane observation or not, he’s certain he won’t forget the ugly twist in Kusanagi’s features. He’s a little thankful his cyberbrain doesn’t dream very often, or he thinks he might soon be having nightmares about her.

_If she did not, this enterprise will have been lost before it even began. So we should be glad of it._

_I guess. I’m at the train station now._

_Here is the address,_ and the download is easy; Charles knows where the new apartment is and how to navigate there from nearly anywhere in Fukuoka. _If you are not here by midnight, you might want to sleep somewhere else - I would suggest a capsule hotel - and attempt again by the morning. If you do that, I must ask you not to go online._

 _I’ll be there, David,_ Charles thinks. _Just give me a little time to absorb what happened._

_Certainly._

He walks for hours, up and down the streets and alleys and the long industrialized stretch of the original waterfront. He thinks about Raven and the Major and David and Max, about bravery and about loyalty and the boundaries thereof. His thoughts chase each other relentlessly, and it’s not until he hears the distant mutter of thunder that he turns back and retraces his steps. 

There is rain in his eyelashes when he finally knocks on the door. It opens for him, silently, and he closes the door and says into the small quiet of the falling night and of the shadowed room, “I’m here. Shall we begin?”

“If that is what you wish to do,” David says. He is sitting next to one of the windows in the cramped apartment. Below the window is a low table, and on that table is a small silver box bristling with wires: a mobile data server, of the type that the Tachikoma carry with them in case they have to be on extended duty. Five of the wires from the server are connected to the back of David’s neck. A sixth, which seems to originate from his right wrist, connects him to a power outlet.

Charles nods, and shuffles over to the opposite corner; and as soon as he plugs in, the world glows blue and then gold.

**Eight: Sending**

_Private message from Max-who-likes-nougat: I’ve been reading a series of data traces from some locations that I think might lead either to my friend or to yours, and I think I’ve discovered something that we can work with. I’ll talk to you later._

For all that he’s been expecting the message, for all that he’s also looking into some promising leads, Charles feels - weary, suddenly, when Max gets in touch. It’s a leaden feeling, he thinks, as gray and as heavy as the Quebec Nine virtual immersion scenario.

He’s going to have to let David in on this particular search sooner or later. It might be nice to have three on the trail instead of two. It might be good to talk about one of the reasons why he’s been so guarded in his few conversations since coming here. It might be what he needs if he can confide in someone who is actually, physically, there with him, instead of being a disembodied signal, a message at a remove, encrypted bits and pieces.

He might have spent a considerable part of his life being profoundly alone, and this is probably the reason why he wants to be with others now, why he misses the noise and the daily rush and insanity of life with the rest of Kōan Kyūka: the childish clamor of voices, the mutter of engines and sudden heat that herald the Tachikoma and their thousands of questions; Batou’s voice rumbling as he works on his guns or exercises or pulls somebody and eventually everybody into the inane argument of the day; Togusa humming under his breath when he thinks there’s no one there to listen to him; everyone else kibitzing in hushed tones as Ishikawa plays several chess games all at once - he wins most of the time, and when he loses, which is rare, he always laughs like he’s utterly, completely delighted.

He thinks of the way the Major cuts through all conversations just by appearing in the door; he thinks of the way everyone leans toward her when she’s conducting a briefing, because no one wants to miss a word of what she says.

He’s not exactly alone, though, not within the physical confines of this place: David is a constant presence, steadfast and silent and tireless. He leaves Charles alone most of the time, and seems to busy himself with several other tasks such as the maintenance and upkeep of the cabling and connections all over the walls of the three rooms. It is strangely easy to be around him 24/7, and Charles wants to know why - wants to know why it is so easy to trust David with his life, and just about everything he has in his cyberbrain, as well as whatever it is that Raven intends for him or them to be able to know, whether from herself or from HELLFIRE.

But Charles also wants to be able to talk about something else with someone else, and Max, somewhat unfortunately, is single-minded in the pursuit of that which he is missing - gone is the Max of the silly stick figures and the good-natured grousing about keeping his workspace clear, and in his place there is, instead, a man who is consumed by the idea of running out of time.

It’s gotten to the point where Charles has wondered, once or twice, whether Max isn’t actually looking for someone close, perhaps a member of his family, or someone just as important - in which case, he honestly envies Max and understands why he might be spending all of his time and energy on the search.

He really ought to let go of his own sense of wanting to be around others, of wanting to be with and know more about Max, because he’s here to find Raven, and he’s here to help Max and not moon about and waste time.

Now, how to explain to David about getting roped into Max’s searches. 

Fortunately, David broaches the topic first: “You have been quiet for a while, so I hope you will forgive me for asking what others might consider a personal question,” he says one night, while Charles is eating a nutrient bar and compiling the day’s data so David can complete their daily dead-drop report to the Major. It is past eight in the evening. They are still within the neon-glowing boundaries of the city, and the gaudy rainbows leave them more than enough light to work by; the rest of the apartment is hidden in strangely colored shadows. 

Charles smiles, one-sided, and finishes his meal. “I think we’ve gone past personal boundaries; I don’t really think they can apply between you and me now, because you’ve been in my head. You _know_ what I’m hiding in there, and you haven’t exactly run away screaming, have you?”

“Indeed you are carrying many things around with you, Charles, and some of them would certainly inspire fear in others. But I think that it might be possible to reserve judgement on these thoughts until you need to call upon them, and if they are used in the right situation then they are useful and have merit. There is a time for rage and a time for serenity, and there is a time for silence and a time for speaking. I would very much like this to be a time of speaking.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Perhaps you could tell me what it is that helps you calm your mind, and if you have ways of passing the time other than with your books or your music. I have noticed that while you are interested in learning about new things, you are also likely to fall back upon that which is familiar to you. I am assuming that this is how you deal with stress, similar to the Major’s habit of folding paper cranes; or because you find refuge in the familiarity, as Togusa does in holding on to his child’s softball.”

Charles really should stop being surprised. Very, very little gets past David. “Does it make sense to you if I say it’s really all of the above? I’ve read Wesley’s adventures over and over again, and I remember nearly everything so I can make reasonable predictions as to future events in his continuity. I’ve done my best to reconstruct the first batch of music that Raven sent me, and I listen to the entire playlist nearly every day. I find both the repetition and the familiarity helpful; it’s as if I’ve used these things to carve out a space in my head where I can do things. I can easily get to that mental workspace if I must, but the books and the music still help me to work, though I’ve gone over them so many times.”

“Perhaps you might say that it is a means of attaining the path to enlightenment,” David murmurs in understanding.

“Do you believe in that?” Charles asks, curious in spite of himself.

“I might be using a better word if I instead say that I grok it,” David says. Even in the dark of the apartment his slight smile is visible. “The Major has mentioned the instances of _seeking_ that have occurred in her life and in the lives of the members of the section. Even the Tachikoma are looking for meaning and for their place in this world. As for me, I know my place, I know my tasks, and I as a consequence am not searching. I do not need to do so. I only feel that it makes sense to support the efforts of others who are doing so.”

Charles thinks about that for a moment. “I think a lot of people would be very, very lucky to count you as a friend.”

“So I have heard. I thank you, Charles, if you consider me as such.”

“Of course I do.” 

He watches as David reaches for his shoulder again; a quick squeeze, and then he lets go, but Charles doesn’t forget that warmth. “If that is the case perhaps we can abridge, and leap to your concern. You wished to speak to me about something.”

“I did.” There’s nothing for it, Charles thinks, but to begin. “You know what I feel about Raven. You know that I need to find her. You know why.”

“And that is as complicated a mix of emotions as I have ever witnessed. It is unfortunate that I have to call it a necessary one. No one should have to be in the predicament shared between the two of you.”

“There’s a little more to it than that,” Charles says. “In the sense of, there’s someone else I want to find.”

“Another friend?”

“I’m actually doing this at the request of another friend.”

“This friend is not someone from Section 9 or from London, or you would have said so.”

Charles nods. “I don’t exactly trust chat rooms. There’s no such thing as _secure_ when the connection itself is always suspect. So I know very little about him. I know his pseudonym, which is _Max_. I know nothing about his actual name or real-world location. I know something about what he does for a living. I know that he pretends to be annoyed about the nature of his work, but in reality he enjoys the challenges of it. He has a strange sense of humor, and he cannot draw to save his life or mine.”

David tilts his head to the side. “What was the nature of his request?”

“When I told him that I was looking for Raven, he proposed a sort of exchange: he would help me look for her, if I would help him look for his missing friend.”

“Quid pro quo,” David says. “I can even understand why he would suggest it. Your task and his, after all, are functionally identical; and with this arrangement there would be two parallel searches, though the objectives might be completely divergent. I assume that we are talking about this, then, because you have started on your half of the search for Max’s friend?”

Charles shrugs, and is once again both grateful for, and confounded by, David’s perspicacity. “Not yet. I wanted to let you know what I was going to do.”

“You did not have to do that.”

“I know. And I don’t know why I felt compelled to tell you. Maybe I think it’s the polite thing to do. Maybe I think it’s the right thing to do. But mostly it’s because - well, this is extra, this is not the mission we’ve been given, and it’s something you absolutely don’t have to participate in at all.”

“It is true that I have to devote my time and my processor cycles to our main task - and we have already made some progress now that Raven is sending you more and more data to help us pin down HELLFIRE and their operations. Still, I do not believe that prevents me from helping you in your search. After all, it is a worthy thing to be doing.”

“David. That’s the reason why I’m doing it, but it doesn’t have to mean you have to do the same. You only have to work on the things you want to work on.”

“A search is a search, Charles. We have just established that. And as I said, I am perfectly willing to lend you whatever spare time and memory there is that is not currently in use.” David smiles, suddenly. “However, there is a condition to my acquiescence.”

It is Charles’s turn to tilt his head at David. “Let me guess, you want to meet Max.”

“Inasmuch as it will be possible to meet him, yes. I also wish to see the data logs that you have received from him; I will verify them for you and start narrowing down the search - unless you have already done so, of course.”

“I think we can do that.” Charles hauls himself to his feet. “David?”

“Charles.”

“I meant it when I said people would be lucky to have you as a friend. Which means I’m very, very lucky that I can call you one of mine. I don’t have a lot of friends, you know. You’re one of the most important ones.”

“...Thank you.”

*

 _New trace incoming,_ David says, and adds, after a moment, _Francis, that does not at all seem like a legitimate defense. I have no idea what you are doing._

 _So much the better for me,_ Charles replies. It’s still a little strange that David addresses him by that alias; the secrecy gets on his nerves, but he knows that it’s necessary. _I’m playing with my instincts, now move already. It’s blitz chess for a reason.  
_

 

 _Pushy,_ Max says, wryly, _and the fact is, I’ve only known you for a short time, and it feels like you’ve always been like that. I wonder how you put up with him, David._ Pause, Black moves on the second chess board, and then Max adds, _Analyzing trace. It’s not something I’ve seen before; where’d you dig it up from?_

_I think the kindest way to put it is that Francis and I have long since reached a rapprochement, Max. And to answer the more pertinent question, I followed one of the leads that you provided during our first meeting. It seemed promising at the time, though I am as surprised as you are that it has led us to Holland._

_I don’t want to know how the two of you could even do that,_ is Max’s amused reply. _And I’m glad that you were right about the trace and its origin. Even if it means that we have to cast out a wider net again. Do you think HELLFIRE already has targets there?_

_That has been the primary assumption of this search, has it not, Max-who-likes-nougat?_

_Yes._ Max continues: _Francis, how’s your head today?_

 _I’m fine, thanks for asking._ Out in the real world, Charles sits up a little straighter in his chair. He blinks and keeps looking out into nothingness. David is still seated beside him, perfectly still on the floor. They are cabled into the box and presumably Max is also hooked up, wherever in the world he might be. 

Not for the first time, Charles wonders about Max’s actual location, given that nearly half of the traces that the man has found in search of his own friend have led to the Asia-Pacific, detours to Europe or no detours to Europe. Will that make it easier or more difficult to retrieve his friend if - when - they find him or her?

They’ve really only been working together for a week now and even Charles has to think about the immense amount of progress that they have made. With the gaps in Raven’s firewall slowly and inexorably widening, Charles is beginning to see more and more of the HELLFIRE network, and to say that it covers the world is an understatement. It seems to have nodes in practically every major city. 

Advantageous to HELLFIRE as that might be, it also presents unavoidable difficulties and weaknesses, which is why David has been concentrating on the series of large-scale data servers that they’ve managed to turn up in Taiwan, which took the combined efforts of Charles and David to break into. Much of the rogue AIs’ data seems to pass through those servers. It’s a bottleneck, a fixed point from which they could start triangulating for Raven’s location and possibly that of Max’s friend.

He tries his virtual immersion scenario tricks on the servers and they yield to him easily, revealing both the massive volumes of data passing through as well as the many, many anomalies infesting the servers, from rogue branching in nodes to badly compiled server structures to stacks riddled with repetitive anomalies. He remembers Max talking about shell games and how they had been part of the method by which he had been separated from his friend, and he has since been concentrating on cataloguing and resolving those strange lapses in programming and concentration, trying to find the relevant patterns.

He sincerely hopes he hasn’t just been wasting the others’ time, and his own, by reusing the methods that worked on the firewall.

They pool their time and nearly all of their information together nearly every night, the three of them preoccupied with their chosen tasks: David does the heavy lifting of searching for data traces and trails that have any relation to the HELLFIRE AIs, Max runs down likely leads for his missing friend and for Raven, and Charles works on his firewall and the information it throws at him in haphazard stops and streams. Hours often pass without any of them noticing.

In spite of all this, they still find the time – and the memory – for chess. David usually plays Charles and Max at the same time, two boards going at once. 

Charles is trying to decide whether he should move his rook or his bishop when there’s a sudden alarm, much like a klaxon, that leaves his ears ringing. _Stay there,_ he calls to both David and Max, and he snaps back to the real world.

The silver box on the table is equipped with a series of running lights on the topmost surface; the first row of six glows a steady white, indicating that David is securely connected; the second six blink at him, alternating white and pale blue, because he’s partly offline.

As he watches, the third row lights up in red, the lurid light throwing strange shadows into David’s face.

It’s the crash signal and there can only be one source for it: Section 9. Specifically, only the Operators and the Major can send it out. Charles remembers her warning about that third set of lights, hears her voice distorting slightly in worry around the words “necessary and justifiable risks” in interrupting their work.

He tunes back in to the three-way link. Max? _David and I are looking at an emergency situation, possibly affecting our real-world location. Can you stand by while we deal with it, though I don’t know how long that might take? Or do you think it would be safer for you and for all of us if you logged out now?_

 _I’ll help if you need me to help,_ is the nearly immediate reply.

 _Status, please, Francis,_ David says.

 _Retrieving,_ Charles answers. 

And then he rereads the message for a second time, for a third, before he goes back to the others. _David, I’m passing the original transmission on to you, because - well, it’s unbelievable, and I need independent confirmation. Either tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll be happy to be - or you can tell me that I actually did just read that._

 _Sounds bad,_ Max says.

David is silent for approximately fifteen seconds, which is a very long time to Charles, since he’s used to the bioroid’s lightning-fast comprehension times. _It is - it is very bad, Max, Francis,_ David says at last. _Message is marked high priority to all public and private networks, all types of access, all over the world: Russo-American Alliance under cyberattack as of five minutes ago. The trigger man or woman is suspected to be under the control of a super-class-A hacker. This person has been made to hold the entire leadership of the state at gunpoint, hostages to whoever or whatever the hacker might be. The projection is that he or she is being used as a conduit in order to hack into the others as well. Any and all assistance is requested. There is a task force already working to coordinate the global efforts._

Charles no longer has any blood to run cold; he shivers anyway, though the apartment is small and cramped and warm around him. _I - I want to help. I will help._

 _HELLFIRE’s used that technique before,_ Max offers, suddenly. He also sounds very strange, as though he’s hesitating over his words. _It was something much more covert than this, though; I don’t think anyone would have noticed that they’d done it, if the person they had been using hadn’t fought back against the hijacking._

 _Fought off the hijacking?_ Charles asks.

At the same time, David says, _Outcome?_

_Their puppet threw off the falsely implanted programming before he - or she - could be forced to fire on a group of schoolchildren. Everyone survived and HELLFIRE retreated; the puppet was taken into custody and eventually released. They couldn’t hold that person; HELLFIRE was, was so heavy-handed in their intrusions that they left metaphorical fingerprints all over that person’s cyberbrain and data structures. Just a puppet, a dupe, nothing more._

_That is more than fortunate for that innocent person; he or she was a victim as much as the children whose lives were threatened were,_ David says. 

Charles only has a moment to spare for the sudden wave of empathy that nearly knocks him down - empathy for whom, he has no idea. Raven, herself under HELLFIRE control? Max? Was he the puppet himself or did he know who the puppet was? The phrase “eighteen point five seconds” rings in his memories and the empathy is suddenly pierced by a memory of Lee’s haunted face.

He almost doesn’t recognize himself when he hears his own voice speaking to the other two: _Max, I’m going to need any and all of the information you might still have from that hijacking attempt. David, do you know how we can get into the major networks serving the Alliance?_

 _I am already patching in as we speak,_ David says.

_Find an inactive cluster if you can - well, relatively inactive given this - and we’ll try to do a little snooping of our own. If it’s HELLFIRE, then we can learn something about them so long as they don’t actually notice us. If not, at least we’ll still be doing something to help._

_Francis,_ Max says after a moment. _Do you want to just retrieve this memory file? Nothing’s been done to it. It’s a completely unmodified record of the - the incident I talked about._

_That’s up to you,_ Charles says, and he tries to make his words as empathetic as he can. _Give us the original or purge the material first - I’m not sure it matters now, and if the details do turn out to be important, I will ask you again. However right now we need just the broad strokes, and we’re going to need them as soon as David find us a way in. So you have - I don’t know - a few seconds. Get to work, but hurry; we might not have much of a window to attack._

_I understand. Thank you._

_Thank me later, and only if we get out of this one alive and sane - though I have to admit, even that last part can be debatable sometimes when I think about myself,_ Charles says, and before he can explain further he senses David signaling to them both. It feels as though he is pulling on the wires or the connections between all of them.

Charles closes his eyes for a moment, and thinks of Raven and of the Major and of Max’s friend. 

As soon as he receives Max’s memory file he yanks back at David’s connection. When he dives into the data, when he feels the inactive cluster begin to reshape itself under his guidance, he can sense the others working with him, watching him work, _there_ with him.

*

Sometimes Max is not online for the data-mining work. Charles has no idea when they all agreed that they would only continue when they were all present, but it is certainly giving him some time for one of his firewall-related projects. 

The Kilo series of virtual immersion scenarios comes out of the fact that the corridor trick didn’t work during the incursion into the Russo-American Alliance; both Max and David had suggested other scenarios, so now Charles is creating one that involves opening and closing boxes. The idea is that even cyberbrains employ some kind of sort-and-stash algorithm to keep the many streams of incoming data in order or some semblance thereof, and boxes are a quick way of visualizing that constant queue and movement.

During these sessions David takes over the work of analyzing the data that the firewall reveals to them, usually in incomplete or otherwise incoherent passages of code and integer strings.

Charles tends to work between the two panes full of diametrically opposing data anyway, and that is why they are both looking at the firewall when the following text pops up at the bottom of the window:

_neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor charles xavier please respond sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit_

_Charles,_ David says, perfectly surprised and perfectly controlled at the same time.

 _I see it,_ is Charles’s reply. It only takes him a short time to save his work and focus his attention on Raven’s message, but he curses every second anyway. 

By the time he finishes with the other task, the message has repeated:

_neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor charles xavier please respond sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit_

There are so many questions he wants to ask, but he has to start with the obvious one, and he throws it into the void, throws out his heart and his hopes: fear and joy and worry and _don’tleaveme_. _Are you there?_

_praeterea raven. not sure how long i can stay, dangerous, monitored bona praeterita non meminerunt, praesentibus non fruuntur_

_I’ve been looking for you for a long time,_ Charles sends.

 _sic sapientia, quae ars vivendi putanda told you not to do that est, non expeteretur, si wanted you out of the line of fire nihil efficeret; nunc expetitur, quod_

_I’m afraid I’m doing the exact opposite of that. We’re hunting HELLFIRE. We’re trying to find you._

_non ergo you have to stop i refuse to put you in danger Epicurus ineruditus, sed ii indocti, qui, quae i will not try to contact you again pueros non didicisse_

“Shit,” Charles hears himself say, out in the real world, and it is his own voice but it is muffled in his ears by the sudden surge of his panic. _Don’t! Raven, please!_

_quo nihil posset why are you doing this fieri minus; ita effici complexiones et i don’t even always know if it’s me working or them copulationes et adhaesiones_

_Charles,_ David interjects. _I am tracing this signal now; try to keep her communicating if you can._

 _Raven,_ Charles begins again, a little more calmly. _I am putting myself in danger to find you, yes, but I am also not working alone. There are people helping me, who want to find you too._

_Numquam hoc ita defendit in so much trouble this is not what brian wanted not what you were supposed to do Epicurus neque Metrodorus aut quisquam_

_How am I not supposed to be looking for you? I owe you a life or part of it._

_e corporis voluptatibus et doloribus - itaque concedo a life to live in peace, to live away from trouble, to maybe follow in my mother’s footsteps, quod modo dicebas, cadere not this causa,_

_I need to find you before I do anything else with my life,_ Charles sends.

_reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias no pull out now they’re trying to wake me up consequatur aut perferendis doloribus please be okay i love you charles_

The world goes black.

It takes Charles several very long minutes before he can struggle back to full awareness; he flails out, once, and comes into contact with angles and joints and artificial skin. _David? We lost her?_

“I am sorry, Charles, but we did,” is the reply, and it’s not that loud, but it’s enough to make Charles wince. “I tried to hold on to the signal for as long as I could, and so did you.”

“Must be why I feel like Batou’s been beating me up again,” Charles mutters, and levers himself back up to a sitting position. 

Something blinks in his heads-up display. He’s only seen the series of numbers and symbols once before, but they are immediately familiar to him. The cross-referencing only takes a moment and a quick, cursory scan of the local networks. “She’s in Fukuoka. We already knew that. And there’s no way we can lock on her IP address; too many layers...what?” He looks up when David clears his throat.

David is smiling. “We do not have to focus on her IP traces because we can focus on the messages themselves. Your friend is sly and very, very good. She was sending her messages in deliberate, brief bursts. There is nothing random in those statements; there is a subtle and regular pattern in them, the type of pattern I have had some experience with deciphering. I have reason to believe there is a further code in the Latin - if not in the words themselves, then in the values behind the words. So I will work on getting you some more information, while you continue to focus on her firewall.”

“There’s not much left of it, to be honest,” Charles says, and he should be happy that there’s something else in the messages. Instead, he mourns the loss of contact even as he crosses to the refrigerator for the last can of barley tea. “The only reason why I’m not breaking the whole thing entirely is because what’s left serves to screen me, and by extension us, from HELLFIRE.”

“I see,” David says. “So if you have nearly finished with that work what will you move on to?”

“Max’s search,” Charles says, shortly. “You’ve got Raven for now, unless she contacts us again and I don’t particularly feel optimistic about that. At least not tonight. So I’m going to work on finding whoever it is Max is looking for.”

“You have access to the progress reports?”

“I do,” Charles says. 

“Then I shall leave you to it. Do not forget to rest.”

In the quiet of the little room he calls his own, Charles thinks about Raven and about her words, about regret - there’s no reason to be short-tempered with David - and about the rage that itches under his skin like an old and familiar and not particularly well-loved memory.

He calls up the Juliet Two virtual immersion scenario and this time, he walks out and goes to sit in the snow. He tucks himself into a hollow that appears between the roots of the great tree, wraps his arms around his knees and holds himself close. It should be cold, but it’s his world, almost the closest he can get to a dream. It only takes a thought and a quick tweaking of the code to cancel the temperature settings.

Normally he likes the quiet of this “place”: the way it used to sink slow and soothing into his bones, the totality of it, and the fact that even if he talks to himself the thick snow piled everywhere will stifle every sound. Right now, however, he is too preoccupied with Raven’s last words to him: 

_I love you, Charles._

A strange sentence, for all that it is short. He can only repeat it in his own voice because he has never met Raven, never spoken to her; and before today the messages have been static, non-interactive. He has always been separated from her in time and in space. He has never been able to have anything resembling a conversation with this person, with Raven for whom he is risking everything he is and has. Even as he thinks back to the communication cut short it seemed like they had been speaking to each other of related things, never really being able to ask questions and get answers.

He wonders what Raven’s voice might sound like. He wonders how long her hair really is, and if it really is as gold as the strand he can still remember, or if it is as gold as the glow of the firewall’s snarled and fraying threads in his cyberbrain. He wonders if he’ll ever see her, if she’ll smile at him, if if if - and even if he knows he’s not really here in this scenario, even if he knows more than most that what he feels in the snow of Juliet Two is just manufactured perception and the illusion of being present, he feels the heat of his tears on his arms and on his knees.

He doesn’t know what _I love you_ means. Oh, he’s read about it; he’s heard it in the words and in the melodies; he’s watched people live and die and start wars over it. It pervades human history and culture. People dream of it and talk about it and divide it into categories and classifications. Even Wesley, a fictional character, knows about those words, and he believes in them, impossibly, because they are part of just about the only good memory he has: a memory of his mother walking in afternoon sunlight.

In stark contrast, Charles’s memories are of inside, the same four walls and the ceiling and the floor, a tiny and complete and limited world. Within the house where he had been born and where he had been confined until it burned down, taking his family with it. Taking away the only people who could or should have had a reason to tell him that he was loved, that he was welcome, that he was wanted. 

But the reality was that none of them had ever taken the time to look in on him, much less speak with him, directly or indirectly - so they never knew that he was wasting away because of his condition and because of everything else that he had been missing.

Including and up to Raven, who had never been there in that house, who should have been there - although Charles is also guiltily thankful that she hadn’t been, or else she might have been lost to him too, taken from him by the flames.

Charles glances at a nearby drift of snow and the words are there, _I love you_ etched lightly into the glittering ice. At first there is only one instance - and then the sentence appears again, and again, until the entire drift is covered in those three words.

What do the words mean? What does the sentence mean?

He looks away, looks down, and Juliet Two shivers and blurs. He squeezes his eyes closed and when he opens them again, with an effort, the snow is pristine and unmarked once again.

For a moment Charles wonders if Max might not be searching for someone who’s said those words to him, or to whom he wants to direct those words - but only for a moment. He has to think about something else; they don’t have time for Charles’s melancholia.

He thinks of numbers, then, and his mind supplies him with a series of numbers: coordinates, pieces of server identification, encryption artifacts. They’ve put this set together from all the stray transmissions that Max has managed to gather, that are purported to be from the missing friend, and it’s Charles’s task now to make sense of those coordinates. The numbers appear in the snowdrifts around him and Charles maps them to possible locations on a hologram globe, turning serenely in the palms of his hands, small and detailed.

Even though he cannot now feel its effects he can still hear the wind whispering in the bare branches above him - until it stops and instead there is a crystalline chime that seems to come from everywhere all around him all at once.

He’s heard that one before, and the length and intensity of it is more than enough to make him blink and reach for silent comms. _David, I think there’s incoming._

 _I am here,_ is the near-instant reply. _Do you need me?_

 _Yes to backup, please, just plug me in, no need to ask for permission,_ and only after Charles hears the second tone, the one that means David has physically cabled them together, does he dive back for the firewall. Juliet Two at the surface of his mind, and the complexities of Raven’s web below.

Another string of numbers. These are oddly familiar. 

He waits, just in case she comes through again, but there is only the hum of the golden threads.

 _All clear. Data again probably,_ he says. _I’ll work on these and report in later._

 _All right,_ David replies.

The new set of numbers is inscribed in the snow, and they are next to another set of numbers that they had already determined to be coordinates - the location maps to a place just outside New Port City.

It takes him a long moment before he notices the crucial detail, which is that Raven’s new numbers are almost exactly like the older coordinates.

The globe in his hands grows larger, his view of the world zooming in quickly, as he focuses on the two sets of coordinates: the Asia-Pacific regions, above the equator, Japan, Kyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture - and finally, New Port City, or the outskirts thereof.

Max’s friend is in or near New Port City - and so is Raven.

Even within this imaginary representation of his own current self-image Charles can _feel_ the blades of the iris diaphragms in his eyes opening and _opening_ , until he’s fairly sure that his eyes are mostly pupil, wide with shock.

He checks and double-checks. They’ve had a couple of incidents of bad data before, and both Charles and Max have refused to tell David about the last time it happened - but even after he runs it through his own scrubber/confirmation algorithm as well as Max’s, Raven’s numbers come out true every time. They are unscrambled; they are cleartext; they are hard data, and maybe _the_ hard data that they have all been looking for.

One more detail, Charles thinks, and he catches the thought as though it were the handle on a door and he’s turning it so he can get through: Max’s friend’s coordinates, Raven’s coordinates, so close as to make nearly no difference, and he grabs the hint of the possibility of the idea with both hands, with everything he has.

There are really only two alternatives to consider here: either Max’s friend and Raven are in the same place, the two of them in HELLFIRE’s clutches, forced to help them or worse; or - or.

Charles stops, and wonders about Occam’s Razor, and whispers it to himself, even though he knows he’s the only inhabitant of this world, of his mind, and there’s no need to keep it a secret:

“Or Raven _is_ Max’s friend.”

*

_Charles._

Someone is calling his name, and he’s been here before.

He dismisses Juliet Two - but not the data, and certainly not what he’s just discovered - and blinks. Here is his cot and here is his blanket, tangled in his legs; here are the lights of the city, and here is David, looming over him in the shadowed darkness. “Hello, Charles. Forgive me for disturbing you. But while you were working something has happened that I think you might be interested in.”

“Did the Major call us? Are we needed?” Charles pulls on a sweater, already unraveling at the cuffs and at the shoulder seams, and stumbles out into the rest of the apartment - and all his questions die in his throat, unspoken, when he notices all the lights and the scent of brewed tea.

There is a man in a bedraggled jacket and mud-splashed trousers sprawled out face-down on their sorry excuse for a couch. He is completely motionless, except for the spasm that sets his left hand twitching at almost regular intervals. The back of his neck is completely bare, and when Charles looks over and peers at the skin, he still doesn’t see the familiar outline of the panel used on some mobile prostheses to conceal the data ports.

 _Who is this,_ Charles asks. _No, don’t answer that. Are you actually going to wake him up?_

 _When I opened the door he said that he had come here to speak to you,_ David says, before he puts his hand on the man’s shoulder and shakes him, once. “Please wake up. The person you asked for is here.”

“Mmpfh,” is the inelegant reply. Hands moving to prop up a long, lanky body.

Charles is inexplicably reminded of the bioroid standing next to him - and then he blinks, and this is the real world, and he _stares_.

But for the scars seaming his face this man could be David, or his twin, or the man David’s face could have been based on. His startling gray-green eyes are hidden behind spectacles, with lenses so thick that Charles can see the refraction distortion around the edges; they sit askew on the bridge of his nose. The lines in his hands could be strain or could be age or could be other scars - hard to tell, because of the old faded stains on his fingers and around his knuckles. He has thick dark hair shot through with too much silver, and it stands up in random spikes from his head, as though he has been sleeping in all kinds of bad positions or has been running his hands through it, or both. 

Charles glances between his two companions again, and shakes his head. He watches the stranger lever himself up into a sitting position, in what looks like a long and painful process. “I’m Charles. Are you looking for me?”

“Charles, who’s Charles? I’m - I’m looking for Francis,” the man says, in a low, rough whisper. “Do you know where he is?” 

There is a very long moment of silence before Charles very nearly swears, and it is very nearly something so bad that he’s only heard Pazu say it once. “That’s me, too,” he says, slowly. “I - I’m Francis-always-cold. And there’s only one person in this world who calls me that. 

“ _Fuck_ , are you _Max_?”

“ _You’re_ Francis? But - oh, you’re wearing a sweater, right,” the man - Max - says, and he plucks at the end of yarn that hangs loosely from Charles’s sleeve. “You did tell me you’d be wearing one of these no matter what the weather was like, no matter where you were in the world. I guess you were telling the truth all along.”

“And you?” Charles counters suddenly, and he very nearly reaches for Max’s wrist. Paranoia flares up in him, a little late - but better late than never. They will not be compromised, and he will not allow David, Raven, the _real_ Max, or himself to come to harm. He is already cuing up the simulation of the corridor and the thread and the doors; he is already preparing to use his own skills against this man who has come here claiming to be someone he knows - and who resembles David so eerily that Charles cannot help but be both alarmed and intrigued at the same time. “Are you telling the truth? _Are you Max?_ ”

“I am Max and I’m also not him. That’s - that’s not my real name. It’s just a name that I know, a name that I use. Just like you say _Francis_ but your real name is something else,” the man says. The remarkable calm of his voice does remind Charles of the man they had only known as a “voice”, as a competitive and odd and brilliant virtual presence, who played blitz chess like a champion and who complained about dust bunnies, nougat, and incompetent people who couldn’t write. “My real name is Erik. Erik Lehnsherr.”

He’s heard that name before. Charles eyes him warily, thinks of the stranger’s hands wrapped around a gun. “Prove it.”

Erik smiles. “I knew you were going to say that. There’s a reason why I trust you, why it’s so easy to work with you,” he says, and he spreads his hands easily. “What is your preferred authentication protocol? You know now that I’m human and cyberized. Come on in. Do what you must. Whatever it is, whatever you have to do. You did something incredible for me, when you asked me to choose to stay or go, when you asked me for permission to look at the memory file that I had offered you. No one had ever offered me that kind of choice before - no one who meant it, anyway. The two of you did it for me. That means something.

“Yes, I had been talking about myself. I was HELLFIRE’s puppet. They almost made me kill all those children. I fought them off. 

“I’m not hiding that. I’m not hiding any secrets from you.” Erik sounds almost breathless when he’s done.

“David,” Charles says.

“Charles,” David replies.

“Tell me you traced him. Tell me you have his bona fides, whatever they might be.”

“I traced him before I opened the door. For my part, the data I have gathered leads me to believe him. You should make that choice for yourself.”

“I intend to.” Charles turns back to Max - to Erik, who is now wearing a faint and weary smile - and grabs his wrist.

The connection clicks into place nearly instantaneously, and Charles closes his eyes and sees a world of luminous red: a world that is also a very orderly, very highly structured mind. Erik’s cyberbrain opens to him, like a diagram that begins in featureless flat lines but expands rapidly: here are records of old chess games. Here is a series of familiar stick-figure drawings. Here is an excerpt from what must be a recent manuscript; a preliminary skim through the sentences shows off impeccable grammar and an extensive vocabulary. It is difficult to decipher what Erik has been writing exactly, but it is easy to see that he knows what he’s doing. 

Other doors open to Charles, brief glimpses: a woman’s smile, surrounded by lines of age and pain and old hurts. A little girl who breaks away from her frightened and bawling companions, from her worried father, to hold one of Erik’s sweaty, bloodied hands in both of her own and ask, _Are you all right, mister?_ A cage with a single BALB/c-type laboratory mouse, male, its little pale whiskers twitching madly even as it sleeps, its pink tail curled in a neat almost-spiral. Nougat wrappers in a tidy pile, pink and white and pale green, teetering on the edge of a desk. 

Dossiers full of information, numbers and characters all running together. The files on various makes and types of firearms, expanded to include improvised guns, large-caliber weapons, and both light and heavy artillery. A series of economy class airfare tickets, always traveling on a red-eye flight. The rain and the snow and the darkness; a glimpse of afternoon sunlight in a stray golden rectangle near a bed with rumpled sheets; the bright limb of a crescent moon on his left as he drives down a quiet road. Hunting and being hunted - looking up into a man’s eyes, into a woman’s, into a child’s, and seeing something _haunted_ and _wrong_ and _nobody home_. Pages and pages of code: attack programs, defense programs, crawler bots. The intricacies of a small-scale server and the schematics for a large-scale one.

Charles reaches for a door that glows golden behind the dark red.

Fleeting image of another smile, of blue-gray eyes and golden hair.

A familiar image. Too familiar.

It reminds him that he’s supposed to tell David what happened - and now, he supposes he has to tell Erik too, because he’s right here with them, because this information is relevant to him.

Charles snaps himself out of the corridor; he blinks, and the real world rushes in again, filling him up. David is at his back, a steady presence. Erik is in front of them, adjusting his eyeglasses and squinting around the apartment.

And incredibly, he is still smiling, slight and amused and sliver-like. “You - you’re good, Charles,” he says. “I mean, I already know what that process of yours looked that from the outside. But when I watched you smash through server-side protections and all those defenses you looked like you were destroying them and yourself at the same time. That - what you did to me - that was the complete opposite, that was gentle. Not light. I could feel you working. But gentle, and I don’t know a lot of programmers or hackers who do gentle in the first place.”

“Does Raven do gentle?” Charles asks, graceless and abrupt. “Is she that kind of programmer? What does she do?”

Erik’s eyes widen behind his lenses. They are bloodshot, which confirms that he is organic, and that he is tired, and that this is nothing he is prepared for. “Raven - _how_ do you know her name? What do you know about her? I’ve been looking for her. She helped me get out of HELLFIRE. I came here because of the data you analyzed and sent back.” He gets up, and he is a little shorter than David, which means that like everyone else in the world he towers over Charles. He looks frantic. “Do you know where she is?”

“Mostly,” Charles says, faintly - and he sits down, hard, on the floor. He just barely avoids falling down into that position. 

“So it’s true?” he continues in a near-whisper. “So you and I have been looking for the same person all along? I had just started thinking about that. I had just started wondering if maybe Raven was the friend that you’ve been looking for. I - well, I think it was last night that she managed to get out a message to me. I don’t know how she did it; David and I’ve been working on that. I talked to her for a few minutes. She told me things. She couldn’t stay long. She said that what she was doing was already dangerous, I don’t know if she meant talking to me or whatever it was that HELLFIRE was using her for. But even though it was dangerous she sent me some new information.

“A set of coordinates. Only we’ve been working on those, together and separately, for a while now, so what else is new, right? We’ve seen maybe hundreds of those in the time we’ve been looking for her. But. I looked at them while I was working on traces for your missing friend, Erik, and at least one set of numbers matched. Almost completely matched. They mapped to more or less the same location. 

“Now you’re telling me that you know Raven. So I was right. I thought that your missing friend might know her, that they were friends as well. It was either that or - ”

Erik sways and falls back to the couch. It creaks and groans quietly as he lands. “It was either that, or my friend and yours are the same person. All right. So where is she? I remember I sent you coordinates for somewhere in or near Fukuoka. How close is she? What is the significance of that location to HELLFIRE? Why are we still standing around here doing nothing?”

When David answers, it is in his usual calm and cool manner, but Charles feels the urge to jump in surprise anyway. “I hardly think that either of you would be in any condition to organize a rescue mission at this time. Look at yourselves. Neither of you can stand. You have been traveling for the better part of two days, Erik, and have just fallen down, and you will not be able to get up so easily. 

“As for you, Charles,” he continues, “you have been working too hard over the past few days, and you have not stopped at any time, because you have been worrying. I would not recommend doing any strenuous work at this time. I insist that you rest. _Sleep._ Both of you.”

“But Raven....” Charles objects. His response is only marginally faster than Erik’s.

“I am still working on pinpointing her exact location at this time - which means that at the very least I am watching for any possibility of her being moved or made to do anything. If either of those conditions is fulfilled, then I will alert you myself, as well as you, Erik, if you will permit it.”

“Yes, please do that. As for yourself - you must be David - do you not need to rest?” Erik asks.

“I do not require it. I am a bioroid.”

Charles watches Erik _stare_ at David for a moment, and then watches him collapse back down to the couch. “I - all right, yes. I must truly be on the edge to not notice that. I - I can’t remember the last time I went to sleep.”

“You are safe here,” David tells Erik. “I will stand watch. That means I am watching out for you, too, Charles,” he adds.

Charles tries to smile and only has enough strength to sigh. “Yes. I - thank you, David.” He looks at Erik, an ungainly tangle of limbs on the couch, and holds out his hand. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to share the bedroom. There’s another cot in there that you can use.”

“Please,” Erik says, half a groan. It takes him a long minute to get up from the couch, and he lags in Charles’s wake, slow shuffling footsteps.

Charles, leading him, is no better. He has to hold his hands out before him to brace himself on the wall, and so that he can find the doorjamb and not walk into it.

Erik sheds coat and shirt and trousers in utter silence and falls nearly headlong into the bed that Charles points out to him; Charles watches him mostly succeed at huddling under the thin blanket and then he’s instantly, completely asleep within five minutes. He’s still wearing his glasses and his pained frown.

Charles starts for his cot - but halfway there he turns and takes an extra blanket from their supplies and throws it over Erik. Now Erik is a long shadow that breathes deeply, evenly, radiating fatigue and an odd warmth into the tiny room. Charles drops into his own pillows, plugs in his power cable, and stares at their visitor until he, too, slides into sleep.

*

“You are the last person I expected to be carrying around something like that,” Erik remarks on the third day after his arrival. “But you handle it remarkably well.”

“As well I should, because you seem to have been my first teacher when it comes to firearms - well, small arms, at least. And I don’t know why you’re so surprised about me and this, since we already told you who we’re with.” Charles hums, and doesn’t look up from the table. There is a white cloth before him, and on that cloth are the components of his sidearm, neatly laid out and waiting to be cleaned. The magazine is full and is sitting on the counter behind Charles, out of easy arm’s reach, well away from the trigger mechanism. The discipline allows him to remember both Erik’s instructions and what the Major had said at their first meeting. “I freely admit I don’t look the part at all. David has a more martial bearing than I do. But we are soldiers, too.”

“On that I am convinced, even before I worked with the two of you during that attack on the Alliance,” Erik says as he fusses over the coffeemaker. “So what exactly is David carrying around, then? I imagine he’d be more than capable of lifting, well, I don’t know, a machine gun or something bigger. Perhaps a rocket launcher?”

“Who needs a gun,” Charles says, completely deadpan, “when you have your very own fleet of spider tanks?”

Erik smiles, and shakes his head. “You are going to have to take me to see these Tachikoma.”

“You really don’t want that,” Charles says, and he smiles at the brush in his hand, thinking of a chorus of happy voices - voices that sang cheerfully even over the rattle of machine-gun fire; voices that never seemed to run out of breath even when they were maneuvering, at speed, over roads and up and down walls; voices that never stopped laughing even when they were discussing memes and quantum mechanics and popular music. “If we have to deploy them in the field, we’re already in the weeds, I believe is one of the relevant expressions.”

“I could have used one of them when I was in Mombasa about a month ago,” Erik says. “How are they with narrow alleys?”

“Depends on what you mean by _narrow_. If you can’t run through those places easily - well, how do you think they’d do? They’d be mainly useless on the ground then, and I’m not going to let any of them make their own way. Watching them ram through walls is hilarious, but no one laughs when people have to clean up afterwards, or if we get stuck with the repair bill.”

“In order to avoid a situation like that,” David says from the couch, “I would order them to fight from higher ground. They can find staircases and prosecute from the rooftops. Or perhaps they could barricade your opponents by blocking the relevant exits. Narrow does not mean they are useless.”

Erik laughs quietly at David’s matter-of-fact tone, and shakes his head over his coffee.

Charles watches him out of the corner of his eye, and wishes he could look away.

He knows the feeling of being lost at sea rather well; he had years to struggle against the idea of confinement, and he had weeks to recover from the shock of being freed.

This is a strange kind of lost at sea, however; it’s one he thinks he can’t escape and can’t do anything about. Worse, he doesn’t want to do anything about it. He wants to be paralyzed and transfixed and rooted here, if it means he can keep looking at Erik.

Here is the weak sunlight that seems to be the only kind the apartment can get, which is only understandable because it is surrounded by skyscrapers and therefore does not actually have much of a sky; the pale light washes Charles out and plays oddly over the lines in his face, emphasizing the artificial rather than the recognizably human, making him look mousy and unnatural.

When Erik sits in that sunlight, however, as he does every morning, as he’s doing now, he looks completely _alive_ , a far cry from the haunted, bedraggled man he’d been on the night of his arrival. That light illuminates both the red and the silver in his hair; it glitters off the scratched and bent frames of his eyeglasses. It makes him look dignified, as though the lines and scars in his face have always been meant to be there.

It’s only been a few days, and they only really see each other for a few hours in those days, but Charles has already built himself a mental map of Erik’s most visible scars: the ones on his face. The most obvious one is the line that almost bisects Erik’s right eyebrow, old enough to have been tanned by the sun but still so recent that the rough and jagged stitching that comes down from his broad forehead is clear, so much so that it still makes Charles wince when he thinks about it. 

Erik’s other prominent scar is the one over his upper lip. It is slightly sunken and no stubble grows in it or around it. Charles doesn’t really want to think about the kind of impact that could have resulted in something like that, nor does he want to know what else that strike could have done to Erik.

He remembers that he’s always paid attention to the details of people’s faces, and how those faces would be affected by time and life and experience. He still has vivid memories of Tom’s wide and unabashed smile and of Chris’s tilted eyes with the crows’ feet at the corners, of the freckles tucked high up near Anna’s temples and of Lee’s many-times-broken nose. He knows Batou’s face and Togusa’s and Ishikawa’s and Saito’s; he knows the Major’s, and he knows David’s. Important data, which will help him recognize them and follow them even through a dense crowd, or on a grainy video feed. The faces of the people who have been and are important to him.

But when he looks at Erik’s face, it’s different: it’s something he’s never known before. When he looks at the man he had only known as Max, Charles feels _moved_. It’s as if the world has shifted and he has to find some way of catching up. It’s as if he’s being carefully turned to follow in the wake of this other person. It’s as if now that he has found Erik, now that he knows Erik’s face, he can no longer go without.

Which is _ridiculous_ , Charles thinks very carefully. It’s easy to think to himself; one of the first lessons that the Major had drilled into him was how to keep his thoughts private, after all. Discretion is a key point in Section 9. So he thinks of retreating behind a wall, of closing a door behind him, and of murmuring to himself quietly. _None of this makes sense at all._ The thought makes him stop right in his tracks, his hands stilling over the work of putting the gun back together. There are only very slight differences between Erik’s face and David’s. They share a lot of facial expressions. They actually look identical in repose, when Erik is sleeping and when David is offline and recharging: lines smoothed out, wear and tear swept away.

So why is Charles drawn to one and not the other: why is he attracted to the one he’s only just met? Why does he think of serenity when he looks at Erik - especially when Erik’s not at all calm, such as when he’s sitting on one of his own tracking runs? Why does he avidly watch the expressions crossing Erik’s face as he lingers over his coffee, as if that face was just as important as the flow of data from Raven’s firewall?

Something clicks loudly in the silence of the kitchen and Charles blinks, jarred out of his thoughts. He wishes he could say that it was entirely a good thing, but part of him wants to keep thinking about strange things. But that comes to a halt when he looks at the gun in his hand - which is now raised to the far corner of the apartment, pointing well away from either Erik next to him or David beyond them both. His finger is now off the trigger, and the slide is locked back.

Which means he dry-fired the gun, one-handed, and wasn’t aiming at anyone or anything. 

He doesn’t even remember going for the trigger. He prefers to shoot in Weaver stance: one hand to hold the gun and the other to brace it.

“I assume you know what you’re doing, Charles,” Erik says, slowly and carefully. 

When Charles blinks again and looks at him, Erik has his hands up. “But just in case,” Erik continues, “I’ll do my very best to stay on your good side. Without the gun you’re already a formidable opponent; with, I don’t doubt that you could take the world.”

Charles looks from Erik to the gun. He almost wants to smile and say nothing - but his instincts get the better of him. 

He has to force himself to meet Erik’s eyes; force himself to say, as quietly as he can, “If that ever happens, will you run away from me, or will you stay?”

Erik is quiet for just a moment. “Of course I’ll stay. I want to be at your side, if you’ll have me.”

Charles looks away and gives in at last to the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth - and out of the corner of his eye he catches, just, the way Erik’s eyebrows are a straight line pulled together above the confused look in his eyes.

* 

“Charles,” someone says.

He blinks and shakes his head a little. He still has a lot of debugging to do before he can add the Kilo Eight scenario to his arsenal of hacking tricks. This particular trick involves something David had described for him, an orrery: a star map, based on three-dimensional models of the solar system. 

His clocks tell him he’s been working on the code for about seven hours now.

Erik is standing just outside the door to the room that they share, and he’s carrying his coat in the crook of one arm. “I took a map of the area from David. I understand neither of you is much given to, well, food, but I - ”

It clicks into place for him, immediately. Erik needs food and likely - candy, sugar, some kind of quick and easy-to-consume energy source; Charles thinks of Erik’s username. “David and I haven’t exactly been good hosts, have we,” he says, nodding as he gets up from his nest of blankets. “Togusa would have my ears for this if he knew. I’m so sorry about that. We certainly don’t want you to starve.” His muscles move smoothly even if he’s been immobile for a long time, and they move him so that he’s standing right in front of Erik, close enough to sense his warmth. “Or to get bored. Do you want me to come along?”

Erik shrugs. “I wouldn’t normally ask for help on a simple errand like this, but call it an entirely human weakness, if you want. My paranoia is getting the better of me again; I feel that if I step out the door there will be eyes watching my every movement.”

“I don’t think that’s just a human problem,” Charles says, and retrieves his jacket. “Given what the three of us are doing.”

“I believe there is a series of books out there in which one of the important side-plots was, what is the phrase,” David says from the kitchen table. “Ah, yes. _Up to no good._ If you are going out, Charles, would you be so kind as to do me a favor?”

“Of course,” he says. “What did you have in mind?” 

David smiles, but doesn’t open his eyes or look up. “Get to a public node and put out the message that I will give you for the Tachikoma. They’ll be able to decipher the data without much trouble. I have not really been separated from them for this long. If I communicate with them in this manner, they will know that I am well, but it will be as a harmless transmission.”

“You’re not worried it might get traced back to you?” Erik asks.

“It is an encrypted message, and I will not be giving Charles either the access key or the cleartext. So it should be safe, and especially so since it will not be originating from here. As for the rest, this is why it was a request.”

“I already said I’d do it,” Charles says. “Give me your message, David.”

He doesn’t really know what he’s expecting to get, so he just blinks because the message is an image of a crocodile, mouth open, as though it is smiling, or about to eat something. Incongruously, it only has two feet, and they are webbed like a duck’s. “I assume this means something to you and to the Tachikoma?”

“Yes,” David says. “But to you and to Erik it is nonsensical, and so there is a layer of protection in place over the two of you. Go, then. Everything will be all right here.”

“If you say so,” Erik mutters skeptically.

“I’m armed, if it makes you feel better,” Charles offers. “And not just with a gun. I have my mind, too.”

Erik does look a little appeased, as well as reassured, when they get down to the sidewalk.

The sun is setting over Fukuoka; already the neon lights are starting to blink and flash overhead, so Charles and Erik cast multicolored shadows on the street. A brisk breeze is coming in from the sea, and it leaves crystalline grit on the back of Charles’s hand. 

“It’s been a long, long time since I was anywhere near a waterfront and could appreciate it,” Erik offers after several blocks. “Mombasa was not exactly a vacation for me.”

“Since you said that it ended with you and a footrace and, I assume, not a little danger,” Charles murmurs, scanning their surroundings, “I think I can imagine exactly what you mean.”

“I stuck out like a sore thumb there,” Erik says. “It was a difficult feeling to deal with: I was an organic in a city that’s now known as a cyborg enclave. It was...strange – and I suppose a dose of my species’ own medicine – to be stared at. To be absolutely and clearly in the minority.”

“After the wars, yes, so many people in full prostheses fled the Americas; they felt that they were going to be made into scapegoats,” Charles says, nodding and sticking his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Not for the first time, he thinks back to his conversation with Anna about the cold and reacting to it; it is all he can do to fight off the impulse to shiver, and he curses his own deeply ingrained need to stay warm at all times, even if his prosthesis is capable of regulating his own temperature. “They more or less took over the cities on the African continent, didn’t they?”

“Which was why I went there, looking for - well, you know what I’m looking for. _Who_ I’m looking for. I thought they would find someplace to hide, or find bodies to inhabit. No such luck. They must be just as paranoid as I am - I’m not sure they’ve ever actually tried to take bodies for themselves - I mean to say empty bodies. Not talking about co-opting people. They’ve mastered that trick many times over. I thought it would lead them to try the other approach.”

“Maybe it’s because taking actual bodies would make them both easier and more difficult to track,” Charles says as they turn a corner. There is a knot of people gathered just outside the bright lights of a convenience store. “After all, people do keep track of discarded prostheses, even if we’re only talking about something as rudimentary as serial numbers and model identifiers.”

Erik nods and shrugs and holds the door open for Charles. 

Charles follows Erik up and down the aisles and watches him squint at labels; eventually, he brings the taller man a basket. Erik huffs with gratitude and amusement as he picks up enough food to last him a few days, including a medium-sized box of nougat-type confectionery. Charles watches Erik hesitate between one brand and another, as he passes the yellow box over in favor of the blue and turns that over so he can peer over his glasses at the writing on the back. 

“And you?” Erik asks at length. “You do have to eat still, right?”

Charles laughs softly. “Are you talking about nutrient bars? Yes, of course I do. And we still have ample supplies. I don’t need much, and on occasion David actually has to remind me to eat. It’s not a healthy habit, I know. I imagine that were I in other people’s company they might wind up bullying me to remember to do these things. So I don’t think you have to be worried about that, or about me.”

That gets him a blank look and silence, and Charles blinks and turns away. He fulfills David’s request and follows carefully in Erik’s wake, half a pace behind as they start walking back to the apartment.

“I think I should,” Erik says at length. “I mean, I should remind you to be...alive, I suppose is the right way to put it?”

Charles keeps his eyes on the road, but tilts his head inquisitively. “Do you mean to say,” he says carefully, “that you do not currently perceive me to be alive?”

Erik favors him with a bleak little smile. “When Raven and I could still communicate with each other, when we could actually have conversations, she kept telling me that for all I was a brilliant writer, for all that I could use my words to show people what my characters could _feel_ , I was completely useless with communicating in, or to, the real world. So now you are getting to know that I’m an utter wreck when I’m in a conversation, when I can’t edit what I’ve been saying. Let me rephrase?”

Charles covers his smile with his hand. “Yes, please.”

Erik’s smile becomes more genuine, more amused. “Thank you. What I meant is, I appreciate that we’re all up to our ears in whatever it is we’re actually doing, because we’re trying to do something good and important. But for all that, can’t we also do these good and important things for _ourselves_? What is the use of being alive if, after we are finished with the task, we’ve been consumed as well?”

“Hence the nougat?”

Erik blinks, and looks at his armful of supplies, and back to Charles. “You do cut right through to the heart of things. Yes, hence the nougat. It reminds me of something good: it makes me remember that I’m still here.”

Charles shrugs easily. It probably makes more sense from Erik’s point of view, but it is easy to understand what he’s trying to say. “Point taken.”

When they get back to the apartment, David is silent and the light behind his eyes is dimmed. 

Charles takes his friend in; he’s now sitting in one of the chairs from the kitchen table, next to the windows and next to one of the power outlets. 

As he approaches David’s motionless form, the following text flashes up on Charles’s heads-up display:

 _Offline for routine maintenance. I have rather a lot of files to archive tonight so I hope that you will not mind if I will be away for about five hours. As of the time of recording this message, the trackers are quiet and there is nothing to report with regard to our shared tasks._

_I have received a reply from the Tachikoma, so thank you very much, Charles, for doing that for me._

_Perhaps you and Erik can amuse yourselves for a while. - D_

Erik, for his part, has one long finger raised to poke at David’s shoulder. “Is he all right?”

“Don’t touch him, he’s fine. Backup operation,” Charles murmurs. “Now that he mentions it, I do remember that this is about the right time for him to be doing this. I hadn’t realized he had a lot of backlog to go through, though - five hours is a long time even for him. I guess we’re on our own for now?”

He watches Erik shrug. “I need to cook anyway; that will help me pass the time.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Erik smiles. “Have you ever been in a kitchen before?”

Charles shakes his head. Memories of an old house loom in the back of his mind, as do the faces of his friends. But it is strangely easy to set aside the brief yet piercing pain, and he is smiling, honestly amused and curious, as he shrugs off his jacket and pulls on the sweater he left behind before going out. He crosses to the kitchen and washes his hands. “All right, what do you need me to do?”

Erik teaches him how to slice onions and peel potatoes and mince garlic. He watches as Erik dices the other vegetables, which go into a cloudy, brown soup; hovers attentively as Erik cuts thick slices from a loaf of dark bread. Charles makes coffee and drops a spoonful of sugar into Erik’s mug. He takes out the garbage and volunteers to wash the dishes.

“Where do you keep _your_ food then,” Erik mutters as he hunts through cupboards for a plate.

“Open the next door,” Charles says, not looking up from drying another pan.

“Oh.” There’s some rustling, and the click of something landing on the counter. 

When Charles looks up Erik is sitting down at the table with a satisfied look in his eyes. Steam rises from the dishes laid out before him. The kitchen is full of warmth and savory smells. 

There is a second plate next to Erik’s, and this one has a nutrient bar on it, still in its wrapper.

“Dinner,” Erik says, smiling kindly. “Will you sit with me?”

“Yes,” Charles says, eventually, and he dries his hands and sits next to Erik; he eats slowly and contemplatively, watching Erik linger over his soup and sandwich.

Charles is reminded of Tom, and for a moment he wonders where the man has gone.

His shoulders brush Erik’s all throughout the meal, and when Erik stands to wash this set of dishes Charles hesitates for only a moment before he hops up onto the counter on the other side of the sink, where he can watch Erik from very close by.

He expects Erik to pull away, but he does the exact opposite of that; if anything, Charles thinks Erik is actually trying to angle closer, even though his movements should dictate otherwise.

“I was thinking about something,” Erik says after he finishes with the chores and sits back down, Charles still following him. They are lingering over the rest of the coffee. The box of nougats is open and next to Erik’s mug are two empty wrappers folded neatly on the table.

“Mm?” Charles asks.

“What you did when you broke through into my mind. How much of - how much of my thoughts, how much of me, did you see?”

Charles thinks that one over. He can easily recall many of the images. “I wouldn’t actually be able to determine that I saw everything. But I saw many interesting vignettes. I thought you were just kidding about the dust bunnies on the floor. Oh, and tell me what you call that rat of yours - the living thing in your room, Erik, not the bunnies.”

Erik looks conflicted for a moment, before he acknowledges the jab with a quirk of his mouth. “I think he’s still alive. But technically he’s not my rat any more. I had to give him away when I left. I...well.” He smiles a little more widely. “I called him Thing, every now and then, or when I actually bothered to call him anything. I just - talked to him? About Raven, and about you, but without naming any names. I was alone, most of the time, but I didn’t want to put either of you in danger. I only thought about your names and never said them out loud. Got used to that, so I didn’t really call the rat anything either.” Erik sighs, and grips his mug more tightly.

Charles does not know much about cheering people up, and only knows how to deal with sad expressions because he’s had more than his share of them, as have Anna and Lee. “You called your companion animal _Thing_? Well, I suppose that’s all right. I almost expected you to say that its name was, I don’t know, Caramel or Toffee or whatever.”

Erik looks over at him and narrows his eyes.

Charles draws back a little but startles and then nearly stands up at the feeling of something poking at him.

Erik’s finger is still extended, and is still moving toward his upper arm - Charles watches, transfixed, as Erik pokes him again. It’s like being hit with a roundhouse kick in the sense that he can feel that touch all over his skin - crackling waves of sensation radiating everywhere from the point of contact. But it’s also very unlike a roundhouse kick – it’s the farthest thing from one, in fact – because he wants that sensation to settle into his skin and to prickle endlessly. 

It’s enough to make him feel dizzy.

It’s enough to make him fall back down into his seat. 

“Do that again? Please?” someone says.

It takes a very long minute before Charles recognizes his own voice. 

Erik _stares_ and is silent, and Charles very nearly thinks that he has to start apologizing, and that perhaps it might not be too late to laugh and say it’s a joke - a poor joke, but a joke nonetheless, and nothing more.

He watches Erik look away, close his eyes, and take a deep breath.

Charles reaches out to him, then, helplessly.

It’s Erik’s turn to suddenly slump over in his seat when Charles makes contact - just fingertips on the warm skin of his forearm, still damp from washing the dishes. Charles can see his pulse suddenly, an almost visible beat in his wrist and in his throat.

“Sorry, I’m so sorry,” Charles murmurs, and moves to pull away.

Only for his hand to be caught in Erik’s, tanned skin seamed with lines and scars. Careful fingers hold him in place - a light grip, but one Charles doesn’t want to be released from.

“Don’t apologize,” Erik says. And: “Is this all right?”

“Yes,” Charles says faintly. “It feels good. Really good.”

That gets him a slight smile, tremulous and fleeting, and Erik’s hand tightens around his. “It feels the same for me, too.”

Charles wants to get closer to that smile, to Erik, and he does: he scoots his chair an inch to the left and now they’re touching from fingertips to shoulders. Erik is even warmer up close; he’s practically burning up, radiating a steady warmth that Charles can feel right through the thick sleeve of his sweater.

They sit, silent and wondering and together, for a while.

Eventually, Charles rouses himself enough to ask a question: “Are you - is this good? Are we doing it right?” At Erik’s raised eyebrow he hurries on. “I thought that whoever it was you were looking for might be a lover, someone important to you, because you were throwing so much of your time and energies into the search...and then we found out that you were looking for Raven, and I...I. I don’t know what I’m saying any more. I should shut up. Lee would be laughing at me by now. He says I think too much.”

“Lee?” Erik asks, quiet and interested.

“Someone who helped me get on my feet when I was still new to the entire being in an actual mobile body thing. He was often rude and often blunt, but he always told me the truth.”

“I should like to meet this person some day,” Erik says, quiet and thoughtful, as though he is taking care not to hurt Charles’s feelings. “But to return to this conversation: I think that you should keep talking, and I will also talk to you. I think that we’ve a lot of things to talk about. Though I must correct you first. Raven and I - well, let’s put it this way. We clung to each other when we could both be lucid, and we fought for each other when we could not. She is important to me, and she saved my life several times. I want to find her so I can return the favor. All of this is true even when we have never met in the real world.”

Charles smiles. “You told me once that I wasn’t alone. Do you mean even in this? In looking for her? In going after HELLFIRE?”

Erik nods, once. “Especially in this.”

Greatly daring, Charles squeezes Erik’s hand. “I’m glad we want the same thing.”

“Not for now, though,” Erik says.

Charles looks over, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“I know we need to get back to work - and I’m sure we’ll have a lot to do once David wakes up. You and I will be spending all our time thinking about Raven, thinking at Raven. I will see you consumed by your task once again, and you will see me lost in mine.”

“Yes.”

“But we’re not working now.”

“No, we’re not,” Charles says, nodding in understanding even as he glances over at David. His clock tells him that about two hours have passed since their return. “We still have two hours or so.”

“Stay with me, then,” Erik says quietly, and he almost sounds like he’s pleading; it makes Charles lean toward him, trying to look at his expression, trying to hear him properly. “As I said: I want to know. Tell me about yourself. Tell me everything you can bear to let me know. I want to hear your stories.”

With every word Charles shivers and smiles and nods. “I’ll tell you everything, if you’ll do the same.”

“I will,” Erik says, and it sounds like a promise.

**Nine: Seizure**

When Charles wakes up, there is a line of persistent warmth all along his right side - a warmth that crackles and shifts and leaves him breathless and, strangely, as relaxed as though he’s completely rested.

Erik has been here for almost two weeks. It had been raining when he arrived. Now the daylight skies are overcast and heavy with the threat of snow. Winters in Fukuoka used to be mild, with rain and single-digit temperatures above zero, according to the Major. The wars have changed that. The nuclear fallout might have been safely contained thanks to the radiation scrubber nanomachines that became known as the Japanese Miracle, but the climate has shifted permanently, and now it is no longer unheard-of for the city to be beset by blizzards and long snowstorm days.

Warmth is good, Charles thinks. He is already most of the way to awake, but he is reluctant to get up. He likes being warm, and for a change, he also likes his source of warmth, because it’s warmer and heavier and actually more comfortable than his thin and flimsy blankets, for all that this source of warmth is skinny and restless and has an unfortunate tendency to snore.

He only needs to turn his head a little to see. He is pressed up against Erik, and Erik is pressed up against him, his limbs a welcome weight pinning Charles’s knees and torso down. 

As he watches, Erik murmurs something unintelligible, hot moist breath tickling the skin of Charles’s upper arm, and then settles again.

There really isn’t enough space in this narrow cot for the two of them, not even if Charles resorts to his usual curled-in manner of sleeping, and not even if Erik braces his back against the wall. They’ve tried to solve the problem by sleeping on their sides, stretched out and facing each other; that has resulted in waking up with bruises, because they hit each other with their elbows and their knees. 

It hasn’t stopped them, however. Charles should have flinched away from the idea of being unable to move - but this is different from being trapped, from being paralyzed. This is pleasant and warm and this is _Erik_ , vital and clingy and surrounding him, as he has done for what is now the past several mornings.

Charles always wakes up first and the first thing he always does is twist around a little so he can look into Erik’s face.

This morning, however, something pings in the back of his head. Charles pulls up the message from David. _Activity detected in Holland and in Taiwan. Nothing big yet, but that could change very quickly. We need to monitor this. I am already setting up the emergency contact line to Kōan Kyūka._

 _Copy that, thank you,_ Charles sends back.

To Erik: “I’m really sorry, but we have to get up.”

“Five more minutes,” is the low, rumbling response. “Please,” Erik adds, after a moment.

“Okay, you can have five more minutes,” Charles says, hiding his smile at the way this makes Erik’s eyebrows crumple together. “I’m going to go and help David.”

The response to that is arms snaking around his waist and pulling him close, tucking him securely into the crook of Erik’s body. He and Erik are touching nearly everywhere, connected from shoulders to ankles. “Do it from here,” Erik growls.

Charles laughs, but doesn’t try to get away. “I have to be physically connected to David or to the mobile server to do that. You’ve seen me use those cables. Maybe after this I can find some way of upgrading my hardware so I can connect wirelessly; I suppose that might make for an interesting challenge.”

“Damn it,” Erik mutters, eventually, and Charles starts laughing as the swearing goes on for a good minute or so. 

When Erik lets him go, his arms and hands linger on Charles’s skin, and it makes Charles shiver and smile. 

He watches Erik turn over very carefully, because he’ll fall off the cot otherwise, and push himself slowly up so his feet are on the floor and he’s upright again.

“You’re very bad at mornings,” Charles teases.

“I’m very bad at _waking up_ ,” Erik says. “Weren’t you? You never told me anything about it.”

Charles hesitates as he watches Erik look over his shoulder at him, and thinks of relying on a bed to sit up and lie down. Thinks of the smells of disinfectant and burning wool. Thinks of a control stick and of the “hood” of an old virtual immersion apparatus. He tamps the memories back down. It is getting easier and easier – it’s slow, but at least it’s still progress. “I had my days.”

Something in his voice or in his face must give his struggle away, however, because suddenly Erik is kneeling on the cold floor next to the cot, hands huge and warm on Charles’s knee. “You’re going to have to share that with me, too. When you can. I told you that I want to know, that I want to understand. I shouldn’t have brought it up now, though.”

“It’s all right.” Charles leans forward until his forehead is touching Erik’s, and when they make contact, he watches Erik close his eyes before he does the same. 

This time it’s Erik who pulls away after just a few seconds, and when Charles looks at him again, Erik looks both alarmed and sheepish. “Sorry. Got pinged, too. Now we really do have to get to work.”

“Weren’t you just asking for five more minutes?” The more Charles smiles, though, the more genuine it gets, until he’s chuckling at the poleaxed look on the other man’s face. He pushes to his feet and takes a new sweater from the closet - and after a moment he adds a pair of leather gloves, not unlike the ones the Major wears when she goes on missions. 

Erik sticks his tongue out at him as he goes into the en suite bathroom and closes the door.

Outside, David has moved the box from the kitchen table to the small square of floor between the armchairs. He looks up when Charles goes to the kitchen and starts the coffee, and smiles kindly. “You are looking better.”

“I wasn’t aware I looked bad to begin with,” Charles says, and feels that he’s had a conversation start like this before.

“I mean that you look - well. Perhaps I misspoke. Let me clarify: you are no longer in the doldrums. You had been all but fretting in the moments when you had nothing to do, and you were actively looking for some way to keep yourself busy. You seem to have settled down.”

“Maybe I have.” He smiles as he waits for the coffee to finish brewing.

“What’ve we got,” Erik says as he emerges from the bedroom – and that’s when all hell breaks loose. 

There is a sudden high-pitched whine in Charles’s head, in the apartment, and it blocks out all other sound around him, from Erik’s pained cry to David shouting, somewhat belatedly in Charles’s opinion, _We have incoming!_

There is a face in Charles’s mind, worn and kindly. Salt-and-pepper hair in unruly waves, and stubble to match. Old-fashioned eyeglasses. A man with an easy, genial smile, which Charles distrusts on sight. 

_Hello. This is a message for Public Security Section 9 and everyone connected to it. I am HELLFIRE, or the visible face of it, and I demand that you stop looking for me - for us. You’re too close now. Cease all operations against HELLFIRE immediately, or else I - we - will not be held responsible for what happens to our - associates._

“No, no, _Raven_ ,” Charles hears himself say - and then he blinks and he’s back in the apartment, and he has to glance around to take everything in properly.

There is a familiar mask of terrible red light over David’s face: the crash signal on the mobile data server.

Erik standing rigidly beside him, with his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. Shock and fear and rage all at once in every line of him.

HELLFIRE’s message repeats for the third time and then, just as it goes silent, there’s a new one right on its heels:

 _Stoicorum libris. erat enim, ut scis, in eo aviditas charles xavier message from raven you’re in danger they’re moving in legendi, nec satiari poterat,_

“Fuck,” Charles whispers, as Raven’s message echoes in his head, repeating and growing more desperate every time, even though in reality it’s only been sent once. The coffee mugs fall to the floor and splash scalding liquid over his feet. He doesn’t feel that, nor does he feel Erik catching him and holding him close, dragging him away from the spill. Charles thinks he might be crouching on the floor, and thinks he can feel Erik wrapped around him.

“Charles,” Erik shouts, too close. “What the hell is going on!”

Charles cringes and clings to him, enough that he can feel the bones in Erik’s arms grinding together, but he doesn’t see him at all. He dives for the firewall. The handful of golden threads still there in that space inside his head is rapidly dissipating even as he tries to catch them and weave them back together. 

_Firewall lost,_ he broadcasts to both David and Erik. _It’s all gone. There’s nothing left. I’m switching to my own shields now. Raven confirms hostiles moving, and I think she’s sending me the data. But there’s too much information here, I can barely make out the cleartext._

David answers him almost instantly: _I can see it - please hold - what? Say again, Kōan Kyūka, this is Proto, please repeat...._

 _What?_ Charles echoes, but the answer is already coming through loud and clear. He only just remembers to loop Erik into the communications circuit between them and the rest of Section 9.

The Major’s message is brief and broken up by static: _\- under attack, holding it off - - - Operators blocked, get the Tachikoma out of the loop - bunker, now - get Ishikawa - - Batou, NO!_

 _Major Kusanagi!_ Charles yells as the link to Section 9 suddenly shatters, abruptly enough that even David winces.

Charles blinks, and holds on more tightly to Erik. “We have to do something.”

“I hope they haven’t tried to hack into - what was that name she shouted?” Erik says at almost the same time. “That last one, before we lost contact?”

“Batou,” David supplies. “The man who guards the Major’s back.”

“That’s not good,” Erik mutters.

“No, no, it’s not,” Charles says, and then he tries to square his shoulders and look at David. “I’m going to assume we’re all that’s left of Section 9 right now. And you outrank me, technically. So: orders?”

“We are not all that is left,” David says. “I am trying to raise the Tachikoma on the comms now. If even one of them is in the clear, if the Major managed to get just one of them out in time, I can use it as a bridge to get in to the others.”

“And can you use the Tachikoma to access the Operators, or find the team?”

“That remains to be seen. Current data is insufficient.”

“Then we have to get you that data,” Charles says. “Not from here. We have to go back.”

“Go back - where?” Erik asks.

“To headquarters,” Charles says. 

“Are you sure this is wise?” David asks.

“I’m open to suggestions,” Charles says as he gets to his feet.

“Then if you are determined, I have one,” David says.

“Yes?”

Charles isn’t expecting David to tilt his head inquisitively in Erik’s direction. “It is not part of our procedure to just _deputize_ people, but I believe this counts as a desperate situation - and in that case, we - I - can act at my discretion.”

“I’ll do whatever you want me to do unless it involves putting Charles or Raven in danger,” Erik all but growls. 

“That is exactly what I wanted to hear,” David says, and smiles. “Welcome to Section 9, Erik Lehnsherr.”

Erik shakes hands and smiles grimly, and turns to Charles. “You outrank me,” he says. “Tell me what to do.” 

“We’re out of here as soon as David is ready,” Charles says, “so if you brought anything that could help us, go get it now.” Before he goes to get his gun, he spares a moment to brush his hand against Erik’s.

David nods and turns away, and starts disassembling the silver box; Erik heads back into their room and comes out with his coat slung over his shoulders. It’s too large for him, Charles notices that now, and the extra material billows with every determined step.

As soon as they’ve left the apartment Erik looks around for a car, and he says, self-deprecatingly, “We’re just borrowing it. David just said it, right? Emergency situation time?” He hot-wires the first one they find that can fit all three of them. “All right, where are we going?”

“Here,” Charles says, and links in to him to send a map.

Within minutes they’re speeding through the labyrinth of streets, back towards the heart of Fukuoka and then out to New Port City. There’s a lot of traffic in both directions, but strangely, all of the cars are silent, even as they speed by. Not even the light snow that begins to fall can produce this kind of eerie hush.

“Pull up here,” Charles directs, eventually, and they get out next to a crash barrier. It takes them a few minutes to weave through the densely packed crowds. He leads them around a corner, and then they’re looking at the same building that he and David had been chased out of when their mission began. The front doors are wide open, and there are no lights in any of the windows.

Charles taps his forehead with four fingertips; David nods.

To Erik, Charles whispers: “Silent comms from here on out, all right?”

 _Yes,_ is Erik’s nearly-instantaneous reply.

Just as they’re walking up the steps to the doors, there’s a quiet echoing click; Charles almost goes for his gun, but first he looks in David’s direction. _That was you?_

 _Yes, it was me. I have cracked the code that Raven is using with her transmissions._

_Tell us,_ Erik growls.

 _Information on the AIs comprising HELLFIRE,_ David says after a long pause. _Ah. I will need you to confirm this for me, Erik. There are four or five of them?_

Erik nods. _There are five of them, except not really, because the lead AI is different. Possibly unique. It’s actually two AIs meshed together closely, just stopping short of a full merger. I have no idea how they manage it, and I’m not really sure I want to know. They’re protected by a mess of walls and traps, which are created and maintained by three lesser AIs._

_Raven sent you information on some of them?_ Charles asks.

 _I think this information covers all of them,_ David says. _S-E refers to the leader that Erik has mentioned, and the others are J, A, and N._

 _So, no pressure,_ Charles says. _Okay. We have to start thinking about ways of getting around them; there’s no way they aren’t already in here, not with that message that mentions us. In the meantime, any progress on contacting the Major?_

Out in the real world, David shakes his head, fractionally. _I am still working on that._

 _Do you need any help?_ Charles offers. _Parallel processors?_

_If you can spare any of yours, but you are still archiving Raven’s data._

They enter the building through one of the side doors, and immediately start heading up. 

The corridors leading to Aramaki’s office are empty.

It makes Charles jumpy, and he glares at everything they pass. He’s almost expecting a firefight before they turn the first corner, but there’s no one in the halls.

He can’t entirely blame Erik for looking around nervously and saying, _Is it really supposed to be this easy?_

 _No,_ David says at the same time that Charles does. 

And then David nods sharply. _Contact with the Tachikoma established. This is David. Identify and authorize, please._

A sweet, childlike voice echoes over the comms in response. _Hello, Mister David! Something is wrong down here. We have been cut off from Mister Batou but we are working to find him again._

 _Hello,_ Charles says.

He can’t help but smile when the Tachikoma respond to him with a quick, although muted, cheer. _Mister Charles! But where have you been? You have been gone for weeks and weeks and we have missed you!_

 _I’ve missed you too,_ Charles says. _And I’m here now, I think. We’re in trouble, and we need your help right now. I want you to focus on something important._

_Anything you want!_

Charles waits for David to nod. _We need to find the Major. Help us do that. Find her, and link her to us. I’m not going to say we’re the rescue mission, but I am going to say that we’re the backup. Can you do that? It’s very important._

The reply is a debate: _But the Major is scary! No, she is nice, just weird! The Major is weird because she is a soldier. Are we also soldiers? Yes, because she commands us and Mister Batou and Mister David too!_

Out of the corner of his eye Charles catches Erik shaking his head; he actually looks as if he’s trying not to laugh. He elbows Erik lightly and goes back to addressing the Tachikoma as seriously as he can. _We are all soldiers now, you and me and David and Erik._

 _Who is Erik?_ they ask.

 _Erik is my - companion,_ Charles says. _And a friend._

_You have a companion! We want to meet him._

_And he wants to meet you. But we won’t be able to do any of that if we can’t get to the Major. Please help us._

There is a long pause that grates on Charles with every passing second.

 _You heard him,_ one of the Tachikoma says at last. _I will work on finding Mister Batou. Everyone else link up and get the Major. On the double!_

Even David has to smile at that last phrase. _It is not always easy to divert their attention from those matters that they deem important._

 _Those matters include you, David – Proto,_ Charles says.

 _You have strange friends, Charles, David,_ Erik says. _Those were the Tachikoma? They sound like children._

 _That’s what they are,_ Charles very nearly manages to laugh. _Children. Nearly self-aware AIs. And have I mentioned that they are also very powerful spider tanks?_

 _Cross them at your own peril,_ David adds. 

The corridors adjacent to Aramaki’s office are decorated in carved wood; Charles stops as David holds up a hand and then presses the fingers of that hand into a recessed half-circle just before the ornate door. _Weapons locker,_ the bioroid says.

There’s a click, loud in the unnatural hush, and a panel pops out of the wall, revealing a rack of guns and ammunition.

 _Now that’s what I’m talking about,_ Erik says with relish; he scans the selection rapidly, and settles on a compact machine gun and two mismatched pistols. 

There is extra ammunition for Charles; he scoops the entire lot into his pockets. He has his gun, and he can remember every form and every method of running he’d learned from Anna and from Lee, and every damn word from Erik’s own firearms manuals. He can remember the Fukuoka combat forms down to the last step and stance.

He’s ready to fight.

He thinks he’s ready.

 _All right, where to,_ Erik asks.

 _Follow me,_ David says.

Charles looks at Erik.

Erik looks back at Charles.

They fall into flanking positions around David; Charles in front and Erik behind. 

Charles holds his fingers up to the other two - _three, two, one, zero_ \- and kicks in Aramaki’s door.

There’s no one in there, but it looks like a war zone: the walls are cratered and there are wires hanging everywhere. Not a single piece of machinery or furniture remains intact. The battleship-like desk is in pieces; the monitor that looks like it had been recessed into the surface is nothing more than broken glass and smashed circuit boards.

 _Physical bodies, then? No one’s concerned about leaving tracks,_ Erik says, sparing the destroyed room one single sweeping glance before he goes back to watching the door.

 _That is not their intention,_ David says. _We must go deeper; we must follow the trail. Charles, if you will. That door is not keyed for me. I can break in, but we should not waste time._

 _Got it._ Charles touches the red panel next to the door in the back of the room, already preparing to hack in. He’s a little surprised when it opens smoothly, and when the passageway beyond it is empty. _Trap?_

 _Trap,_ Erik says, without any hesitation.

 _I concur,_ David says.

 _Wesley has a policy on traps,_ Charles says, and he picks up a handful of broken glass, and throws it through the open door.

The siren blares loudly - not in the physical world but in the virtual one, in the space where David and Erik and Charles are working with the Tachikoma to find Kusanagi and the others.

 _So much for stealth,_ Charles says. 

_A policy on traps? Well, there’s really only one of those that makes sense,_ Erik says wryly. _Trust you to like a character who actually_ springs _traps and expects to live through them._

 _That’s the thing about him - he doesn’t, but he can’t die unless the books get canceled, and I don’t think that’s happening any time soon,_ Charles says.

The thunder of their running echoes all up and down the second set of corridors; it nearly drowns out the occasional snatches of distant song that they can pick up from the Tachikoma.

What their footsteps don’t cover is the low drone from the walls all around them.

 _Tactics,_ Erik growls.

 _You have been in a situation like this before,_ David says.

_Didn’t think I’d be back in one. Didn’t want to be. But yes._

_Let’s not stop and think about it,_ Charles says. _Let’s just keep going._

_When it was me,_ Erik says, as though he hasn’t heard a word, _they did it when I was off my guard. I was careless, I was stupid, to let them in at all. They used Raven._

Charles wants to stop. Wants to tell Erik to stop.

They can’t.

They need Erik’s information.

He leads them down a set of narrow stairwells, now, and he watches everything inside his head and outside of it. He grits his teeth and keeps listening to Erik.

_...if the E entity is in charge, getting hacked into is like ice creeping into the veins. Cold. Lassitude. Coercion. Not like the S entity; that one is all brute force._

_They have both hacked into you,_ David says, interrupting. He phrases it delicately enough that it could still be construed as a question.

Erik bares his teeth in a crooked, humorless grin. _They had time to do with me as they wanted. You want to be crude about it? They took turns with me. It’s what they do to everyone they get their claws into._

Charles sighs and leads them to the end of the corridor, to a familiar pair of huge doors. He lets David take the lead again, and goes to Erik, and takes his hand.

Erik clutches Charles’s hand fiercely, and closes his eyes just for a moment.

Charles wishes he could help Erik pull himself back together, and hangs on.

Beyond the huge reinforced-steel doors is one of the main rally points for Section 9. It is a series of large interconnected spaces, large enough to hold everyone in the team plus their weapons plus their own contingent of Operators plus the Tachikoma. It’s one of the places from which both Aramaki and the Major can coordinate important missions, and it’s also, apparently, been the site of many a party, if Batou’s stories are any indication.

It doesn’t quite look like a party venue now. Charles and the others have to pick their way across the wreckage strewn all over: broken computers, the apparent remains of one of Batou’s weightlifting machines, opened toolboxes, and the like. While all of the doors leading into the current space are intact, many of the others have been destroyed.

 _Tachikoma,_ David says, seemingly undisturbed by the destruction, though he picks his way carefully to the center of the room. _I’m here. Authenticate._

One of the walls shimmers and disappears, revealing a dozen or so familiar blue shapes.

“Hello,” the lead Tachikoma says quietly. “Hello, Mister David. Hello, Mister Charles. You must be Mister Erik.”

Charles holsters his pistol and approaches that tank, and puts his arms around its “head”. “Are you all right?”

“They tried to get to us,” is the solemn reply. “They attacked just now. We fought them off. It was not easy.”

“If you’re all here, and you’re all okay, then you did a good job,” Charles says, and he rests his forehead against one of the tank’s “eyes”. “I’m proud of all of you.”

“But it caused us to lose all our progress in locating the Major and the others.”

“Then let us begin again,” David says as he moves to a corner of the room and sits down to reassemble the mobile data server. “I am here, and I can help you, and the process will go more quickly.”

“I believe in you,” Charles tells the Tachikoma. 

“Thank you, Mister Charles,” they chorus quietly.

Charles steps to Erik’s side and watches as the Tachikoma arrange themselves in a tight semicircle around David. “I guess you want us to look around,” Charles says after a moment.

“If you do that, I would prefer that you do it together; you will each need someone to watch your back,” David says. “It is my hope that at least one of the other members is here, since the Major mentioned the bunker.”

“Except that she might have meant: get out of it,” Erik mutters.

“Perhaps. In either case, we are obligated to check. A search must be conducted.”

“I know what to do,” Charles says. “But it will mean - ”

“Yes, it will mean locking me in here,” David says. “I will not be alone. I will have the Tachikoma.”

“And you’re okay with that?” Erik asks.

“I know that Charles will have told you of my connection to them. Whatever you were told only skims the surface. The Major knows what we can do if we,” and David smiles and leans against one of the tanks, who chirps quietly at him, “are working together.”

“I’d like to see that,” Charles says.

“If it comes down to a fight in here, you will.”

Charles thinks that over for a moment, and then walks up to David and offers him his hand. “Happy hunting, then.”

“Thank you. We will do our best,” David says. The Tachikoma thrum together as if to add reassurance to his words. “Now go. Let me know if you need help.”

“Yes. Come on,” Charles says to Erik. “Help me close the rest of the doors.”

He goes right and Erik goes left. Each set of doors closes with a loud _clang_ , and Charles writes a guardian program into each mechanism, linking them all together and then to David and the Tachikoma.

By the time Charles and Erik meet at the last open set of doors, the same set that they used to get in, David and the Tachikoma are silent.

“I don’t know why I think that’s impressive,” Erik whispers. “They’re all just sitting there. But I can feel what they’re doing in my cyberbrain. It feels like there’s a wall in there. The good kind.”

Charles nods, because he can _see_ it, too, if he closes his eyes. “They’ll protect us.”

Together, they step out, and they lock the doors behind themselves.

 _Silent comms again,_ Charles thinks in Erik’s direction.

 _Copy that._ There’s a pause, but it isn’t quiet, because Erik is checking his weapons; the little sounds rattle soothingly in Charles’s head. 

Watching Erik’s hands, feeling the warmth that still radiates from him despite the chilly corridor and the coat, fills Charles with a sense of _together_ , of the two of them looking out for each other. It’s more than enough reason to think of some kind of defense mechanism that they can share, and Charles dives into his programs, into the little snippets of code that he keeps until they should be needed. He sets up an additional shield along the link between them that could also serve as an early warning system, just in case something that they don’t recognize comes after them.

Charles’s sense of urgency is renewed when he thinks of the darkness in Erik’s eyes whenever he remembers what HELLFIRE did to him and to Raven.

The program comes together rapidly; when Charles is done, it glows a faint red in his mind’s eye, and he extends it carefully in Erik’s direction. _When you’re done in there I have something for you._

He’s expecting Erik to nod, or shrug, or to simply acknowledge him with a look.

He’s not expecting Erik to turn to him, or to place his fingertips to Charles’s temples. Startling as it is, it feels good, it feels like more than a physical connection between them, and it makes Charles sigh and close his eyes.

And then he reaches up for both of Erik’s wrists and downloads the program directly into him.

 _That’s - you’re good,_ Erik thinks, once they manage to step apart from each other. _You came up with that on such short notice._

 _Thank you,_ Charles thinks. _It’s been waiting in here, in my head. It was ready a long time ago. Let me know when we can get this search started._

_Right now._

It’s slow going, because Charles peers carefully at every inch and every shadow; it’s slow going, because Erik sticks close enough to touch and stares at the ceiling and at the floor, even when there isn’t enough light for him to see by.

There is a rising hum in the distance, and in his head, Charles begins to call out. _Raven. If you’re here, if you can see me - see us - we’re coming. Raven. Please talk to us. It’s Charles and Erik. Raven?_

There is a huddled shape in one of the doorways. Charles glances over his shoulder, watches Erik position himself to cover him and whatever it is they’ve found. Here is the curve of what looks like an arm and a hand. Charles lets his sleeve drop to cover his hand, his fingertips, and reaches out for the shape.

A woman’s face, but not quite a human one, gapes up at him. Eyes empty. Mouth open. Cheekbones like Anna’s, but where she blazes with life and with strength this is just a made-up face. Something that’s been stripped of its purpose. _It was an Operator,_ Charles says, sadly.

 _Was?_ Erik sounds confused.

_Deactivated. I hope they can get her back. We can’t really survive without them._

_Just the one? Where’re the rest?_

_I have no idea,_ Charles says, but before he can keep going there’s a sound, and he cocks his head, because he can just vaguely recognize it, because it’s just that much out of step with Erik’s breathing.

Another strange breath, and one more. Whoever is here with them is wheezing, winded - but still alive.

Erik takes a short step to the side, leaving Charles just enough of himself to use as cover, as they approach the source of the sound.

 _Mateba Autorevolver,_ Charles says at the same time Erik does, and they then exchange startled looks.

 _You know this why?_ Erik asks.

Charles is both worried and apprehensive. _I have a friend who carries one._ He looks around the corridor, walks around the corner, and comes back. _Togusa?_

From behind a stack of half-damaged crates some six feet away, someone groans quietly in response.

 _Erik!_ Charles calls, and they rush toward the moving shadow.

“Charles,” the man says when they find him and return his gun to him. “How the hell did you get in here?”

“David,” Charles says, simply.

“Proto’s here, and you too? Good, then maybe things can start making sense again,” Togusa says. “And who’s _this_?”

Charles grins, even as he turns Togusa over and checks for other injuries. Togusa’s right leg is bent at an unnatural angle, and there is blood caking in his hairline. As Charles watches, Erik tears off his left sleeve to mop the worst of the red away. “We - we kind of had to deputize him. This is Erik Lehnsherr. He’s with me - with us, now.”

“Hello,” Erik says. “Hold still, please.” His right sleeve comes off, too, and he folds it up into a makeshift bandage, tying it around Togusa’s head with the bloodied one. 

“Do I want to know where and _why_ you know field first aid,” Togusa asks dryly.

Erik only flashes him a brief, lopsided smile. “Long story. Not for here.”

“What happened,” Charles asks.

But before Togusa can reply to either of them, David calls out to all of them: _Signal located._

Charles raises a hand to both Togusa and Erik. _Is that the Major?_

_I am assuming that it is her, for now, since these data signatures correlate with hers. Hello, Togusa._

_Hello, Proto - David,_ Togusa says. _Good to hear from you again. Is she here? Is Batou okay?_

_I do not know anything about Batou’s condition yet; one of the Tachikoma is attempting to trace him without much success as of this time. So we will have to concentrate on the Major. What is her condition and where did you last see her?_

“Okay, short version,” Togusa says, holding on to Erik for balance as he hauls himself partly to his feet. “I wasn’t even supposed to be anywhere in the area; I was waiting for Pazu to pick me up from my house. We were supposed to be looking into something Ishikawa had turned up last night. While Pazu was en route we all apparently received the same message from the Operators: _Unauthorized access attempt on central memory core detected. Corrupted signal._ ”

 _The message we received was different,_ David says, _and I expect, a related one. We were called here._

“The question is, by who,” Erik growls. 

“You’d know something about this?” Togusa asks.

Erik nods, a tight movement, and Charles aches with sympathy for him.

“Okay, I suppose I should apologize in advance, but I’m going to need to keep asking you questions - ”

“Ask away,” Erik begins to say, but he is interrupted when another voice blares out in their heads, seemingly from everywhere. Distorted, very nearly unrecognizable.

Charles leaps to his feet and his gun is out and tracking toward the rest of the corridor. His back to the other two. He is dimly aware of Erik hissing and looking everywhere he can, even up to the nearly invisible ceiling.

_\- sanagi to Section 9 - request assis -_

Charles takes a deep breath and consciously wills himself to calm down. _Major. This is Charles. I’ve brought backup with me._

_Authentic -_

He thinks about Wesley and about the strange arsenal he carried around with him at all times, and allows himself a tight smile. _Custom .45 caliber Safari Match-M semi-automatic, extended magazine, and you mocked him for using it._

There is a sense of disjointed relief in the harsh, metallic-rasping comm voice. _Charles. Backup - not safe -_

“I gathered that,” Togusa all but snaps. “We can skip the damn briefings. Where the hell is she?”

 _Location, please, Major,_ Charles says.

_\- not easy. Got Batou. Have to keep knocking him out._

_Where are you?_

_Next level down. - don’t have passwords -_

_If Togusa knows how to get in we can find you._

_\- he’s not okay -_

“Well, obviously not,” Togusa says. “Which is not to say that I can’t help.”

 _Major,_ David cuts back in. _The Tachikoma have your location. Let me take care of matters up here, and you can focus on briefing the two whom I am sending down to you. Charles, Erik, please be ready to go down. Togusa, please be ready to move out._

 _\- Erik who is Erik,_ she asks.

 _He’s with me, Major._ Charles glances at Erik, and he almost wants to smile at him, but this is too serious a situation for that right now. Instead he waits with bated breath until he can hear the distinct thud-whirr gait, and even then he’s still the first to get to his feet when a Tachikoma heaves into view and fixes them all with its eyes. 

“I am here to get Mister Togusa,” it says, solemnly. Even its whisper rouses echoes from the dark spaces all around them, as does the loud pop-hiss of the cockpit hatch opening.

Charles pats the Tachikoma on its head and watches Erik pour the just-barely-standing Togusa into the pilot’s seat. It doesn’t stop Togusa from hissing as he arranges his arms and legs into correct position. 

“Sorry,” Erik says.

“Not your fault,” Togusa answers, “but it’s your job now to get the bastards who did this.”

Erik’s grin is brief and feral. “With pleasure. I’ve a few small scores to settle with them myself.”

“You’re mostly okay,” Togusa pronounces. Before he closes up the Tachikoma’s hatch, he offers Charles a salute and three passwords. “I think all of those are still current; if they’re not and you can’t hack in, you let us know.”

“All right. And the same goes for you. Yell if you need us,” Charles says.

“And now it’s up to us,” Erik says, when they’re alone again. “This is not the right time for me to be telling you things.”

“I’d like for it to be,” Charles says, “but you’re right, too. We have to concentrate on looking after each other.”

Erik nods, once, looking grimly determined. “And we will survive, and afterwards we’ll talk.”

“I look forward to it,” Charles says. And again: _Location please, David, or Major, if you’re there._

No one replies. One moment there is silence and in the next Charles blinks, his cyberbrain rapidly interpreting the coordinates he’s just received. He’s been here before but no one has ever told him about the very depths of this place, and now he has to go down there.

They double back down the corridor; one of the wall panels opens to one of Togusa’s passwords, and a draft of cold air whistles past them.

 _Someone’s been here recently,_ Erik thinks. He points down to the footprints on the dusty staircase. 

_Too many possibilities. Too much danger. I don’t care. I’m not doing this alone,_ is Charles’s reply.

As they move down into the very depths of the bunker Charles feels Erik take his hand. It’s not the most advantageous thing to do in terms of tactics, but Charles doesn’t think about letting go.

*

 _I’ve been here before,_ Charles says, suddenly. _Or at least, I’ve thought about a place like this before._ He pulls the image up for Erik’s benefit: a corridor full of doors, the door handles tied with string, the strings disappearing into darkness. Maybe there aren’t any strings in here, but this is still close enough.

 _Where do all these doors lead?_ Erik asks.

_I have no idea. I didn’t even know a place like this existed beneath the bunker. I just know where the actual Section 9 boltholes are. Not this._

_Your Major said she had to keep knocking Batou out. And from the looks in your eyes and in that guy’s - Togusa’s? - I’m gathering that’s not exactly the smartest thing for anyone to do, or the easiest._

Charles frowns. _It takes a tank and more to put Batou down. Not the Tachikoma, they’re too small, and they’d never go after him, not even when he’s being hacked. Against him we have to think big._

_I am thinking big. But Charles? There’s no space to fight in here, much less knock someone down and make sure they stay down._

_I know, Erik. I know._

The corridor is narrow and the doors are all locked. This far down, even the combined signal coming from David and the Tachikoma is faint and distant. Every now and then Charles thinks at them, tries to send them an update on their status.

There are no answers.

 _I’m starting to think you and I can only keep communicating because we’re right next to each other,_ Erik thinks as they turn a corner and sidestep a door with the electronic locks smashed in.

 _Yes,_ Charles thinks. _Let’s see if whatever proximity we’ve got can help us raise the Major. Kusanagi?_

Silence.

_Major. It’s Charles. We’re here._

No one answers.

 _Kusanagi,_ Charles thinks again.

 _That’s not good,_ Erik thinks, and that’s when he lets go of Charles’s hand, so he can go for his machine gun.

Charles wants to mourn the loss of contact, because down here it’s so cold and Erik’s hand is almost as hot as a brand around his. Instead, he follows Erik’s lead, and turns around partway so that they’re pressed back to back even as they keep moving. _Kusanagi,_ he tries again.

The voice that answers is one that stops Charles dead in his tracks. 

_CHARLES! Charles Xavier! If you can hear this, if you can hear me: please, please, get out!_

“Raven,” he says, nearly soundless with shock. Even so, her name seems to echo inside his head and within the walls hemming him in; even so, her voice is so loud. She sounds terrified and angry; she sounds like she’s fighting someone or something - or even herself.

Even in the low light he can see that Erik, too, has gone pale. _Raven, it’s me,_ Erik thinks, loudly enough for Charles to hear. _It’s me and Charles. We’re here. How are you here? Where are you?_

_Turn back, PLEASE turn back, I’m - they’re - I don’t want to do this, please don’t make me do this, LEAVE NOW LEAVE NOW_

_I won’t,_ Charles says, and looks over his shoulder. Erik looks stricken but he looks just as determined as Charles feels. _I can’t let you go, Raven. I’ve come so far to look for you, I’ve changed so much, I’ve learned all kinds of things just for you. I will stop at nothing now to find you, now that I know you’re so close._

 _Please don’t, please don’t, I don’t want to hurt you, they’re going to make me hurt you,_ and then the words stop and someone begins to wail. 

Charles blocks out the sound as best as he can, and when he notices Erik flinching away he reaches out to him and puts his hands over his ears. _Stay with me, Erik._

“That’s Raven’s voice,” is the half-strangled reply. “I - I’d know her scream anywhere.”

Charles would go pale if only he still could - but since he can’t, he settles for shaking Erik once, roughly. “Let’s make it stop.”

“Okay,” and Erik breaks into a run and Charles hurtles after him in hot pursuit, down the twisting narrow passages and over ripped-out cables lying in pieces.

The voices in Charles’s head are multiplying: the echoes of Raven’s screams, Erik calling out to her, the Major still sounding disjointed, the distant and nearly inaudible clicks that must be the Tachikoma or David tracking them as best as they can.

 _Be careful what you wish for,_ a cold high voice suddenly says. It would be a feminine voice, Charles thinks, if it had belonged to human or cyborg or android.

 _Because you might get exactly what you wanted._ A voice made even more menacing by the kindly tones: the voice of HELLFIRE from the earlier message. _You cannot stop us now. We have already incapacitated your Major. What makes you think you can succeed where she has failed?_

“Not listening,” Erik says.

“Yes. Not worth listening to,” Charles says, and they turn another corner. This corridor should have ended in a pair of huge doors not unlike the ones they’d already passed through - but the difference is the huge gaping hole in this set, the smoking edges of it, acrid stink of burnt copper and shielding.

Charles watches Erik hold up his left fist, watches him scan the area quickly but carefully.

He does the same, reaching out on the silent comms for anyone who could be on the other side, who could be on their side. _Kusanagi. Raven. If you’re here, so are we._

Instead it is HELLFIRE that answers, and the words are punctuated by a series of gigantic crashes, loud and powerful enough to rattle the debris at their feet, to shatter the door even further. _Last chance to retreat. You come in here and you are fools, and you will be **our** fools._

 _Are you ready for this, Charles?_ Erik shouts in his mind, a far more potent voice than HELLFIRE’s.

 _I won’t say “Let’s find out,”_ Charles replies. _Because I am. Because we are ready._

They charge through the door together - and before Charles can even think about rolling out of the way he’s already doing exactly that, and a huge something or someone flies through the space where his head had been just seconds before. 

Erik lands heavily across his feet and grunts, and gets back up. _Can’t see a damn thing._

 _Then let me be your eyes._ Charles switches his vision to infrared, and the place lights up in vague red and black - fortunately more than enough for him to make their surroundings out. 

He links to Erik’s cyberbrain and shares the images with him.

A hot shadow in one of the faraway corners, rigid and unmoving. Two others repeatedly crashing together, residual heat leaking out from the joints and in patches all over the bodies. 

The form in the center of the room _blazes_ , and Charles thinks of that as his target, and levels his gun at it. Calculations in his cyberbrain, waiting for the two in the fight to get the hell out of the way, and he only has one chance for this shot and - _there, there, Erik hold your fire this one’s mine -_

His senses are fast enough to track the bullet and he know he hits home - but it’s the form in the corner that reacts to the impact, falling limply to the floor with a much quieter scream.

 _Lucky shot,_ the genial voice hisses.

 _It’s not going to keep us down,_ the almost-female voice says nearly on top of that.

 _More than enough time,_ Erik says, suddenly, and Charles spares a second to watch his heat signature run across the room; through Erik’s gloom-adjusted eyes, he can almost make out a head of light-colored hair, pale enough that it could almost be familiar. _She’s okay, I’ve got her, she’s not the priority right now! Get to your Major, Charles!_

 _Yes!_ He gets to his feet and braces himself again to fire; there’s a lot of recoil on this gun, but he holds it steady as he empties one magazine into the central figure. 

Just as he’s reaching for a replacement the smaller of the two fighters skids heavily past him and he only catches a glimpse, but the glimpse is enough: it’s the Major, and she’s pointing to her mouth.

 _They disabled her comms,_ Charles thinks, in surprise. _So that’s why we lost her - Erik, I’m going to need to borrow some processing power from you, I’d rather have speed than thoroughness now -_

 _Take everything you need,_ Erik all but shouts, and adds, _Get down!_

Charles doesn’t let the terrifying echoes of Batou bearing down on him or Erik shooting at the central figure slow him down - he just reaches for Erik and the Major at the same time, and pulls up the Kilo Eight scenario. Stars bloom behind his eyes, stars and planets and moons, and every planet is a mind in this room and every moon is a program and either friend or foe. He holds the Major’s mind in one hand, careful and protective, scanning it over for other damage. He goes after the blocks that HELLFIRE has placed around her communications subroutines.

Breaking through is strangely easy. It’s as easy as debugging one of his virtual immersion scenarios. Building the Juliet series was much more difficult than this, even after he got used to the intricacies of the code. One of the moons begins to flicker in and out of the virtual orrery, and he can feel HELLFIRE fighting him. The moon’s orbit becomes more and more erratic, spiraling out and in toward the world that represents the Major; it grows spikes and then it grows a full-on defense system.

But Charles is both patient and inexorable and he fights HELLFIRE off, as methodically as he can. He seizes the image of the rogue moon in his other hand, and it glows white-hot at him as he takes it apart, routine by routine, line by line, until he gets to the machine code at the heart of it and then it’s easy to turn it inside-out, to break it down completely.

He closes that hand into a fist. The moon flickers one more time, before it disappears.

 _Good work,_ the Major says briskly as she gets back up and throws another powerful punch, leaving Batou sprawled at her feet. _Thank you; now I can devote more time to him. Although I’d appreciate it a lot more if you could break him out of it. Pulling punches is hard work for me, too._

Charles sends her the image of one of his amused smiles. _What else did you think I was going to do next?_

She looks over her shoulder and smirks at him, briefly. _Touché. And you’ve got someone helping you._

 _Call him a Section 9 irregular for now, like what you did to David and me._

_I do applaud your resourcefulness,_ she says, and dodges a clumsy kick from Batou. 

_He’s more than just a resource,_ Charles says fiercely. 

_I can tell. I’ll leave you to your work, then._

_Good hunting, Major._ To Erik: _Ready for the next one? This is going to be a little trickier. They’ve got him thoroughly ensnared, and I can barely make heads or tails of this. Unless you can help me by explaining what it is they did or are doing to Batou?_

 _Give me a moment,_ Erik says, and again he fires a volley of shots at the man-shaped figure in the center of the room. Silence descends like a thunderclap. _That noise was getting on my nerves. You were saying?_

 _There was a noise?_ Charles asks, startled.

 _You didn’t notice - what were you doing, were you countering them?_

_Countering? I was busy helping the Major - you know what, forget it for now. Not important. I’m locking in on Batou now and I need your help. If you can tell me what they’re doing to him...._ Charles reaches for Batou’s mind and the moons swarming around it: a multitude of black spheres, a malevolent cloud buzzing frantically.

Erik explains: _It’s a lot like what they did to me._ Ensnared _is a good word for it. They burrow into you, they look for your weak points, and they turn you inside out, they leave you twisted and hating the things that you ought to be taking your strength from -_

 _Do you want out of this?_ Charles asks abruptly. _Bad memories and all. You don’t have to keep reliving them. Just - defend me, I suppose._

_I’ll do that anyway, even if you don’t ask me to,_ Erik says. _And don’t you dare let go of me. You want me to help you - I’ll help you. I’ll do it gladly._

_Thank you. ...I’m beginning to wear that thin, am I?_

He just plunges right into the work without waiting for Erik to answer. He has enough of his awareness of the outside world remaining that he ducks when someone yells at him to, that he can dodge away when someone gets too close. He can listen to Erik’s voice, and trust that Erik will keep him safe.

Charles takes a deep breath and focuses on the mind before him: Batou’s mind under attack. 

There is only one possible weak point Batou could have and it is the one thing that everyone in Kōan Kyūka has in common: they are disparate individuals, they all have their own mindsets, they all have their own codes of morality and the lack or knowing disregard thereof, they are human and machine and they are _one_. All of them are loyal to Kusanagi Motoko, some more than most, and Batou is loyal to her and only to her.

It is his strength.

HELLFIRE has twisted that strength into something terrible and corrupted.

Charles is having none of that.

He picks carefully at the black mesh ensnaring Batou’s mind, even as Batou’s body continues to fight the Major - they throw each other into walls, they strike each other with brutal force, and this would have been fun if this had been one of their usual sparring sessions, but this is nothing of the sort. 

There is a rage beginning to burn up in Charles, a familiar rage, and he takes it in and uses it, applies it to his task, and he’s soon working at speed. One by one the moons go out. New ones spring up to take their place. Charles simply keeps powering through them while at the same time working on Batou’s mind.

He can feel HELLFIRE trying to strike directly at him, trying to get to Erik, but Charles’s shield holds, glows an even and reassuring red in the corners of his virtual sight. 

_Batou,_ he calls. _Batou. Wake the hell up. We need you. The Major needs you._

Charles feels like he’s trying to complete a circle, coming back around to the starting point and yet already completely changed by the journey. He remembers fear lodged in his throat and choking him, letting him breathe just enough so he can continue to live and so the fear can continue to eat at him. He remembers getting up and taking his first steps out into the world: shaking as he stood next to his bed, next to the windows; walking and running and learning how to fight. Learning how to defend himself, learning how to protect others - two different things, two wildly difficult lessons. 

He remembers flight and being lost and being found again, and he remembers finding himself. He remembers reaching out to the voices in his head, despite the walls between him and them. He remembers a series of names and, eventually, faces to match the names, minds and hearts and hands reaching out to him, and they were none of them his weak points. They were the focus of his life; they were the reasons why he kept going.

He thinks of loyalty and he patiently works his way through Batou’s mind. The traps are almost like the ones that had been holding the Major back, but far more insidious in their intent, and Charles has no compunctions about tearing through the code to reveal more and more of the inner workings of his friend’s mind, a soldier’s mind.

 _Come on, come on,_ and it feels like he’s been working for a long time when there is a sudden shift in the image of the orrery and something is pulling him along, something strong and determined, and Charles really wishes he could laugh but he has to keep going.

 _I’ve got you,_ he calls to Batou, _I’ve got you, come on, keep fighting! Help me help you!_

And finally - there is silence and there is darkness, both in his virtual world and in the real one. Silence, except for people breathing hard; darkness, as the orrery’s lights all wink out at the same time.

It takes Charles a moment to realize that he’s on his knees on the floor, that the Major is standing over him and over a fallen Batou as well. 

_Is everything all right,_ she asks.

 _Major,_ Charles says. _We’ve been here before. I - it feels like you’ve been beating me up, too._

 _I can imagine,_ she says, and she puts a hand on his shoulder. _Your method was imperfect, but extremely thorough._

_Did it work?_

Batou coughs, loudly, and rolls over onto his front. “Fuck this, what got me?”

“I did,” the Major says. “And Charles helped.”

“Is that what I was doing,” Charles says, faintly, and he grinds the heel of his palm against his forehead. It does seem to push away some of his pain. 

The next thing he knows there’s a hand fisted in his shirt and in one smooth movement he goes from looking down at the floor and bracing himself on his free hand, to more or less wobbling upright on his own two feet. 

He looks up, into a familiar pair of cybernetic eyes, and offers up a tentative smile. “Welcome back, Batou,” Charles says.

“You’ve got them out of my head?” Batou growls quietly.

“As best as I could.”

“They’re not in here?”

“ _I’m_ in your head now, checking,” the Major says. “I think Charles managed to take all of them out - and I don’t just mean you. He chased them all out of my head, too. Charles? I think you’ve got them on the run.”

“We can only hope,” Charles mutters.

“They can’t see what I’m thinking?” Batou asks.

“No more than I can,” Charles says promptly, “and since I’m not hacking into you, no.”

Batou smirks. “Good. Because there’s something I need to do.”

Again that extreme physical strength coupled with stunning speed, and Batou _moves_ : one moment he’s in front of Charles, and the next he’s crossed the space of the dark bunker and gone right to the thing standing in the center, and the terrific _crunch_ of cyborg fist meeting constructed face echoes again and again in the darkness.

The Major rushes over to the fallen body - Charles can now see the kindly face, a man’s face, worn and wrinkled in life, now left blank and strangely cruel - and stares at it for a moment, and finally says, “They’re not in him - there’s no longer any such thing as _him_ , to be honest about it. I’m going to want to know how you did that.”

“And as satisfying as that might be for all of us,” Erik suddenly mutters, “that’s not the only thing that needs doing.”

Charles runs to him, and sinks back down to his knees. He takes the hand of the girl that Erik is watching over. Now that he’s closer, he can see the golden hair, clumsily hacked short so it falls in an unruly halo around her face; it is still the same shade of bright gold that he remembers vividly from a poisoning and from a firewall, and there’s no doubt in this mind that he knows who this is. “Raven,” he whispers, and he bends over her mouth, listening for her short, shallow breaths.

“She went down the first time you shot at the HELLFIRE construct,” Erik says.

“I remember,” Charles says. “You checked her over?”

“Nothing wrong with her physically,” Erik reports, terse and still looking around for danger. “I’ve tried to communicate with her in here.” He taps his temple. “No response so far. I hoped you’d be able to help, but you might be too tired - you broke the Major out and it took you easily twice as long to do the same for Batou - ”

“Does it matter?” Charles asks fiercely. “Does it matter that I’m tired? No. I’m going in. I’m getting her out, too.”

The Major clears her throat. “I’ve got everyone else, I’m having them home in on us here.”

Charles blinks and looks up at her. “Are they all right? And why here?”

“You’re going to need support,” she says, gently, kindly. “Just in case something goes wrong in there. If you need us, you just have to shout.”

“And I’m going to stay right here - give me that,” Batou says, and he takes the machine gun from Erik, checks it over quickly. “My turn.”

Erik nods at him, and then he takes both Charles’s free hand and Raven’s in each of his own so they’re a circle, the two who had been searching for the one, returning to their shared task.

Their hands are warm on Charles’s skin: Raven’s hand warms up further the longer Charles holds on to it, and it makes him think of a light to follow, something that he’s always been moving toward.

Erik’s hand is as hot as a bright and steady flame, and Charles can hold his fingers cupped around him and feel how fiercely he burns, a burn that protects and a burn that banishes the chills of the night and of loneliness.

 _Don’t you leave me,_ Charles thinks as they fall away from Section 9, as they plunge into familiar light. _I need you, Erik. Stay with me._

 _There’s no need to ask for something that you already have, Charles._ He receives an impression of Erik’s restrained, lopsided smile. _I don’t swear oaths that easily, or that quickly. It took me so long to trust Raven and to learn how to fight for her. But I’ve trusted you from the moment I started communicating with you. You are the exception - and I’m glad it’s you._

Out in the real world, he’s warm, again, and with more than just being in contact with the other two - he’s warm like he’s being held, like there are people watching out for him - and it’s enough. It’s more than enough. It’s something he can hold on to, even as he dives deeper into Raven’s cyberbrain, even as a familiar wall looms up ahead, the gold nearly overtaken by the black.

 _HELLFIRE is in here - she’s the nexus, she’s the central core,_ Charles says to the room at large after a long moment of shocked contemplation. 

_They didn’t choose to be in a physical body because the heart of them was already in her, in here,_ Erik adds. _That other guy was just a mouthpiece._ There is a long pause, and then: _I - Charles, I can help you with this, I know about this part._

_I don’t want to ask, Erik; I know these aren’t exactly memories to hold on to. But I have to know._

Erik’s image in his head wavers, once. _I know. And this is something I also know because Raven took this out of my head. Because we were linked together to begin merging into something like this. I fought it and she helped me and she kicked me out of the link. That was where my escape started, and you know where it ended._

 _And they were able to dig into you one last time because of the remnants of the merge in your head._ Charles wishes he were in his physical body, because he needs to move: not to recoil away from either Erik or Raven. He wishes he could move so he could pull them closer, so he can hold them both.

 _Yes._ There is shame, again, in Erik’s voice, and a sense of urgency. _Let me help you. Let me do this so I can forget the rest of it. So I can make amends._

 _Don’t think about making amends. Think about saving a life._ Charles reaches out and twines his virtual presence around Erik’s. _But you might have to do most of the work for this. I’m so tired, so tired, I don’t know how the Major or Ishikawa do the things that they do. This whole hacking thing’s got me on my last legs._

_Tell me what to do, Charles._

He does, and when the corridor shows up again, familiar and well-known, he reaches out to the image of Erik who is standing right next to him. _Take a strand and open a door. Any door. That will get us started._

Erik takes his hand, and together they reach for a knot of black and gold.

Charles holds his breath for what seems like a very long time, waiting for his code to lock on to them, onto their chosen position in HELLFIRE’s programs, and start to work.

Their patience is rewarded when the knot suddenly and yet inevitably explodes in a silent, painless flash of light.

 _Together,_ he says to Erik.

 _Together,_ Erik replies.

 _For Raven,_ they say.

**Epilogue: Save**

Charles gasps and starts when a weight lands on his shoulder, and he should know better. He should know that he’s safe. He should know who this is. 

“Easy, Charles,” Erik says anyway, identifying himself when he doesn’t have to. Just one more reason why Charles is more than grateful to have him. He wills himself to calm down, mostly succeeds, and opens his eyes just in time to watch Erik take off his dark-visored helmet and heavy gloves, to watch him push his glasses back up onto his nose. Erik smells of masonry ground into dust and of cordite and of the particular fuel that Batou brews up for the Tachikoma to use.

“Good shooting, Erik,” Ishikawa says as he gets up from the flatscreen-topped table and stretches. The sounds of creaking bones and joints are loud in the small, dark room. “I liked how you blew that other idiot out from right under Pazu. Not a lot of people who can make a shot like that, and you know one of them - he’s on this damn team with you.”

“I’ve had time to practice, and Saito said he thought I could take the shot. It was good that the target was preoccupied,” Erik says.

“Good for us you’re no slouch, especially when there were so many chances for that situation to go bad in a hurry. At least we’re all still alive at the end of it.”

“Mostly,” Charles mutters darkly as he eyes the blood and the ripped-open sections of Erik’s combat suit. One of those is far too many, in his opinion, and Erik’s shoulders are shredded nearly down to the lightweight armor underneath.

“I think we can file that one under _work-related hazards_ ,” Ishikawa says, grinning. “And I’m not forgetting you, Charles. Best decision I’ve ever made, leaving ECM coordination to you. A little more time, a little more practice, and you’ll be as fast as _all_ of the Operators working together. We’ll keep working on some of your reaction times.”

Charles nods. “Yes, please.” 

“Now I’m going to go talk to the Major, turn things over to the others, and then I’m probably going to let Saito talk me into a few beers. I could use a cold one after that. You boys want to come along?”

Charles grabs Erik’s offered wrists and gets to his feet. “I’m not sure I’ve recovered from last week, so I’ll pass, thanks. Erik?”

He gets an amused shrug in reply.

“Your loss,” Ishikawa says, and he tosses them a mocking salute before he closes the door behind him.

“My head hurts,” Charles mutters. He presses his fingers to his temples, and fights off the memory of nerve impulses going haywire, of being imprisoned by the least amount of pain because it triggered more and more pain, cascading agony.

And then he blinks because he looks around and then back to Erik, who is gazing at him, and there is something warm in his eyes that Charles has no idea what to call. 

“I don’t have to be in your mind to know exactly what it is you’re thinking about,” Erik says. “Come on, let’s go home.”

“But you’re hurt; someone has to look after you first.”

Erik smirks. “What is that joke that Raven frequently makes? Ah, I remember. _It’s just a flesh wound._ She has a very old-fashioned sense of humor, I think.” 

“Old-fashioned or not, when that joke comes from either of you it’s not even remotely funny,” Charles growls, and he hammers the point home by poking Erik in the shoulder as hard as he can - though he also carefully avoids the fresh wounds and the newer scars. The skin gives under his touch, a pale indentation that darkens again as soon as he takes the pressure away. 

All too human, all too fragile, but he’s not going to be the one to talk to Erik about cybernetic enhancements. It is a conversation that happens far too often in Section 9, before and during and after a mission. He will not push Erik to decide, and in the meantime he will worry about Erik whenever he’s deployed in the field along with the others.

Raven’s daily video message comes in just as Charles keys in the security code for their apartment - it’s a little bigger than the one Erik had found him in, and it’s also much closer to HQ. If they look out the windows, and they spend a lot of the quiet nights doing just that, they can look out over the Fukuoka shoreline and, beyond that, to the horizon. 

To get to the rest of it they have to pass through a small sitting room/kitchen, just enough to fit one or two other people in, and just enough for Erik to fill the entire place with amazing smells every few days.

_Dear Charles and Erik, Sure wish you were here. There’s much more sun here than I thought there would be. By the time I see you again, which will be soon if I’m lucky or if I get bored, I might be as brown as the nuts that everybody seems to be eating around here. I wonder if you’ll even recognize me!_

_On a more serious note, it’s really done me a lot of good to be lost, really properly lost, which was what I was supposed to be doing in the first place until my skills got the better of me and got me mixed up in something big and bad and terrible. I should apologize, Charles, because I’m taking too long to get back, when we still have so much to catch up on. I still have so many stories to tell you. I owe you, and you will have all the time in the world to collect. I promise you that. Just let me have this first. Let me remember who I am, away from you, away from Erik, away from Fukuoka._

_One more thing, Charles, and maybe you’re tired of hearing me say this by now, but it’s not going to stop me from saying it again. Please, take care of Erik. If nothing else, you really do need each other. And me staying away means you two have time that isn’t focused on everything else except for the one important thing that you need to do, which is this: be together. Tell me all the gory details later, like much much later. Just - take care, and take care of each other, and don’t you let him get killed._

“Why does everyone think I’m trying to do the _exact opposite_ of staying alive, when _alive_ is what I want to be,” Erik mutters indignantly - but he turns and complies without a word when Charles raises an eyebrow at him and indicates the door to the other room.

The first-aid kit is heavy, even for someone in a mobile prosthesis, and Charles grunts a little when he puts it down next to Erik’s side of the bed. 

This is the real reason why Charles prefers this place: most of the floor area has been given over to the bedroom and its attached bathroom, and most of the space in here is taken up by the truly enormous bed. There’s more than enough room for the two of them in this one, and yet every morning they wind up curled together in the middle, side by side and facing each other, as though they are back on something as cramped and familiar and memorable as a narrow, creaky cot. 

“Shirt off, and move forward a little,” Charles says, and extracts a pair of tweezers, a roll of sterile batting, and a shallow metal dish from the large box. He waits for Erik to take his glasses off and twist the sheets into a sort of nest, then slides neatly into the space behind him.

Erik’s hisses of pain trail off into a silence that is both willing and resigned. Eventually he relaxes enough to slump over with his forehead against his raised knees, even if he does still twitch with every extraction of splinter or piece of stone. 

Charles goes over every inch of exposed skin with slow precision, applies careful pressure to each wound; and when Erik’s back is done he shuffles around on the sheets until he can focus on the one long gash running up the outside of Erik’s right leg. “How did you get this,” he murmurs, and he cups his free hand over Erik’s bony kneecap before getting back to work.

“You were watching when I had to tackle the Major out of the way of, basically, things falling down on her head,” is the wry answer, punctuated by winces and, once, a groan that he muffles in his hand.

“Sorry,” Charles murmurs.

“Don’t be. Anyway. I had to slide the last few feet to get to her and get her out of the drop zone. Caught a large shard of glass. The suit took most of the damage.”

Charles nods and puts the tweezers down, and reaches for the antiseptic cream and the bandages. He watches himself tie off the knots, snug against Erik’s skin, but not too constricting. “That’s what they’re for. You should be fine, you don’t even need stitches - this is bloody but it doesn’t seem to be that deep.”

“Since I think Batou intends for me to _run_ tomorrow, or whenever it is we get up,” Erik says, gesturing at his leg, “I think I will count that as good news.”

“You are doing _nothing_ of the sort. If Batou insists, let me know and I’m going to hack into him,” Charles mutters as he gets up and heads to the sink in the bathroom so he can wash the blood and sweat and dirt from his hands. “Seriously. I have the method, and I don’t even need a motive. I could charge admission, actually, I’ve had this little bet going on with Togusa and David for some time now, and - ”

He’s interrupted by a flash of a grin and Erik joining him in the cramped bathroom, wrapping his arms around him from behind. He lets Erik walk the two of them back until they’re standing right next to the bed. “As amusing as it always is to watch you make plans for world domination, I’d rather be doing something else tonight.”

“Such as?” Charles pulls him closer so he can support more of Erik’s weight. 

Charles lets Erik bear him down into the sheets, until he’s flat on his back and Erik is curled up around him on his left side, with the side of his head resting on Charles’s collar. Charles wraps his arms around Erik’s shoulders. One of Charles’s hands is cupped around the back of Erik’s head, soft and dusty strands tangled around his fingers; the other is holding Erik’s free hand, which is resting on his chest.

“Let me rest a little,” Erik murmurs.

“Do what you want,” Charles says, and means it.

Erik is a warm and heavy presence all around him, a presence he can’t get enough of. He carries that presence with him even when they’re outside of this bed, even when they’re out in the world and making their way through it. He remembers David’s amused smile as he pointed out Charles’s tendency to turn in Erik’s direction every time he walked into the room; he remembers the Major’s smirk as they sat down next to each other at the foot of the conference table.

They talk to each other whenever they’re together and whenever they’re working apart; if they can’t communicate directly, with their own voices, they still have the private comms from those desperate searching nights, and they can still send each other messages.

Still, Charles prefers the physical presence of Erik - and the strange thing is that Erik seems to gravitate toward him in just the same way, just as he did when he came back in from today’s work.

Charles fits his hand and Erik’s together and looks at the differences between them and at the similarities. He can see the joints and some of the servos clearly on his own hand, can feel the support struts and the hydraulics immediately under the skin; and Erik’s hand is just as interesting underneath. Here are the scars and here are the blood vessels running up from his wrist; here are the bitten-off edges on his nails. 

So different and yet when they’re clasped tightly together, as they’re doing now, they fit; they are a whole. Not for the first time, Charles marvels at this, at them, at the idea of being _together_ , however they define it. 

Silence falls and he looks down, to Erik’s brow creased even as he seems to sleep, and Charles reaches out to him, thinking only to brush that frown away.

He’s not expecting Erik to groan, a low keening note that shudders against his skin, rapid panicking breaths.

“Please, don’t - ” Erik whispers, and Charles can feel the runaway jackhammer beat of his heart as he shifts and twitches restlessly.

“Erik - ”

“No, not Edie, not her, _please not Edie -_ ”

Charles freezes. He knows that name. He has known it from the first morning, when Erik told him about his family in confiding, halting whispers. A beautiful, sweet smile in a ravaged face: Edie Lehnsherr. Erik’s mother, who had made nougat for him, who had been the sun and the moon and the stars to him until disease and age took her at last. 

So he knows the truth and he takes it up now for Erik’s sake. He grips Erik’s shoulders firmly and shakes him. _Wake up. You are dreaming. You made sure that HELLFIRE would not find her in your mind. You made sure that they would not sully her memory. Edie is at peace, and you are only dreaming. Wake up, Erik. Come back to me._

Erik shudders, and tries to push himself up.

Charles grabs for his wrists, holds him fast and repeats, _You are dreaming. Edie is okay. HELLFIRE never knew her. HELLFIRE never hurt her. You are dreaming, and you must wake up._

_Charles?_

_It’s me,_ he says, careful and gentle where he’s on the edges of Erik’s mind. _Just you and me and your dreams. Come back?_

He waits patiently for the response, for Erik’s hands going slack against the sheets. _I - yes._

He feels it when Erik takes a deep breath, hot and shaky against his skin, and he puts his fingers back in Erik’s hair, thumb moving in tiny soothing circles. _You can go back to sleep in a few minutes. But I want you to calm your mind first. Forget about your nightmares._

Erik nods, and Charles lets out a relieved breath, and he almost doesn’t notice the touch just in the hollow of his throat, light and fleeting.

Except that the touch couldn’t have come from Erik’s hands because he can still see where they are.

 _Erik,_ he asks, startled and wanting to _know_.

_Charles._

“You kissed me,” and saying it out loud seems to make it more real.

“I did. Had a lot of things to say. I found the words inadequate.”

Charles smiles. “They can be that. But Erik, you’re doing it wrong, don’t you think?”

Finally Erik lifts his head; Charles smiles at him until he smiles back, tentative around the edges. “How am I doing it wrong?”

“I’ve never been kissed, so maybe I’m not doing this right,” Charles says. “But maybe...”

Charles leans forward, then, and kisses Erik. That mouth is warm under his, and it feels like he’s burning up, for all the brevity of the contact - quick as a nerve impulse racing to the brain and back, chaste and gentle in its impact. _Oh. Oh, that feels good!_

“Not as good as this,” Erik says, and Charles is still wide-eyed and looking at him when they collide, and he never wants this to stop, and he hangs on to Erik with everything he has, and he knows that Erik is hanging on to him too.

They kiss, and their hearts are battlefields and their bodies have been through the wars and back and their minds are open to the contained infinities of vast cyberspace, and they are here and now, together at last.

**_end_ **


End file.
